Situational and personality effects on smokers’ psychological reactance

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the situational and personal aspects that may trigger smokers’ psychological state reactance. It was hypothesized that situational factors, such as perceived threat to freedom and perceived loss of control, which are supposed to be triggered by an anti-smoking persuasive message, and a personality pattern, such as trait reactance proneness, predict the psychological state reactance. Design/methodology/approach An experiment and a survey were conducted on a random sample of 246 smoking undergraduate students in two Tunisian business schools. Four anti-smoking print ads, with two different levels of negative emotional intensity, were manipulated. Findings The findings depict the importance of the anti-smoking ads with a high negative emotional intensity, the perceived threat to freedom and trait reactance proneness in the smokers’ psychological reactance prediction. Originality/value This work seems to be important to the extent that few works have combined situational and dispositional factors to explain the smokers’ psychological reactance. The findings in this paper seem interesting insofar as they show the importance of the personality factor and the fear appeal in triggering smokers’ anger and negative cognitions that lead, in turn, to the arousal of psychological reactance. This paper should be of interest to readers in the areas of health communication, social psychology and social marketing.