By agreeing to make its family-oriented movies smoke-free and "discourage" smoking in films distributed under its Touchstone and Miramax brands, the Walt Disney Co. has implicitly endorsed the claim that smoking on the screen leads to smoking in real life.
While that connection may sound intuitively appealing, there is little reason to believe that decisions like Disney's will have a noticeable effect on smoking rates.
Reporting on Disney's new policy, Reuters cited research finding that "children with the highest exposure to smoking in movies were nearly three times more likely to start smoking." Anti-smoking activists, such as UC San Francisco professor Stanton A. Glantz, who runs the Smoke Free Movies project, go even further, asserting that cinematic cigarettes account for 52% of smoking initiation and that an automatic R-rating for movies with smoking "would cut movie smoking's effect on kids in half, saving 50,000 lives a year in the U.S. alone."
Those claims are based on a 2003 Lancet study that found 10- to 14-year-olds who had seen movies with many smoking scenes were more likely to try cigarettes than kids who had seen movies with fewer smoking scenes. The problem with attributing this association to cinematic smoking is that it's impossible to control for differences in personality and environment that make kids more likely to see movies with a lot of smoking in them, which already tend to be R-rated movies.
The study did take into account measures of "sensation-seeking," "rebelliousness" and "self-esteem," as well as "social influences" and "parenting characteristics." But it's unrealistic to suppose that such measures fully account for all the relevant differences. To put it another way, something distinguishes kids who see a lot of R-rated movies from kids who don't, and whatever it is -- parental permissiveness, attraction to adult themes, a tendency to act out -- may also affect their inclination to smoke.
Methodological difficulties aside, the size of movies' alleged effect is implausibly large, to put it mildly. Glantz says cinematic smoking accounts for even more real-life smoking than advertising does: 52% versus 34%. Is it even conceivable that exposure to movies and advertising causes 86% of smoking? That all other factors in life, including peers, parents and personality, together contribute only 14%?
