Products That Promise Help Seem to Prolong Vices

Warning labels on cigarette packs may be well and good, but a new study suggests that advertisements for products designed to help people stop smoking -- or, for that matter, to lose weight, reduce debt or otherwise stop bad behavior -- should carry a health warning of their own.

That's because so-called remedy advertisements have a boomerang effect. By suggesting the risks of misbehavior are manageable, they reduce the chances that people who need help will decide to get it, says Lisa E. Bolton, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

In one test, smokers and nonsmokers read material about the benefits of a stop-smoking aid. Members of a second group, also comprising smokers and nonsmokers, read material about how to quit smoking unaided. Then they were given a questionnaire that asked whether they thought an aid would help them quit cigarettes, about their perceived risk of smoking, and whether they planned to stop. (Nonsmokers were asked to assume they smoked.)

The results were unequivocal: Both smokers and nonsmokers who read about the aid saw smoking as less of a health risk. Moreover, they were less likely to indicate they would quit smoking after reading about the aid -- and the most extreme reactions occurred among those who smoked the most.

Additional experiments produced equally compelling evidence, Bolton said. One tested an ad for smoking patches. Another pushed a bill-consolidation program to manage or eliminate credit card debt. Still another touted Chitosan RX Ultra-- a diet aid.

Again, those who most needed to stop smoking, cut credit card debt or shed pounds were the most likely to downplay the risks of their respective problems after reading about a remedy. They also expressed greater intention to continue behaving badly after seeing the ads promising help -- even if they doubted the claims made in the ad.

"As problem status rises, remedy messages undermine risk perceptions and increase intentions to engage in risky behavior" -- essentially offering men and women behaving badly "a get out of jail free card," Bolton and her colleagues concluded.

Another View of the Globe

Our favorite mapmakers have done it again. University of Michigan physicist Mark Newman and his colleagues at the University of Sheffield in Britain have just released their latest cartographic creation: a world map made so that the size of each country and territory is proportional to the growth in wealth that occurred there between 1975 and 2002.

This striking cartogram visually tells an important story. The rich got really richer: The United States and much of Asia look about ready to burst. At the same time, the African continent virtually vanishes, reflecting the region's economic stagnation. So does most of South America.

Overall, two-thirds of the world's countries experienced an increase in gross domestic product, led by China, the United States, Japan, India and Germany. The biggest losers: Ukraine, Russia, Poland and Saudi Arabia (though $3-a-gallon gas will fix that, pronto).

Narcissism and the Bottom Line

If I only had a little humility, I'd be perfect.

-- Ted Turner

Some social scientists have long suspected a link between narcissism and entrepreneurial success. Think Ted Turner, George Steinbrenner and the Donald.

Well, think again, say Arijit Chatterjee and Donald C. Hambrick of Penn State University's business school. They measured narcissistic tendencies of chief executives of major software and hardware companies by the length of each CEO's "Who's Who" entry, prominence of their photos in annual reports and the number of times the exec was mentioned in company news releases, among other things. Then researchers compared the CEO's narcissism score with the company's performance.

"Narcissistic CEOs . . . tend to generate more extreme performance -- more big wins and big losses -- than their less narcissistic counterparts," the researchers wrote in a paper presented last week at the Academy of Management annual meeting.

But they also concluded that those big gains and losses tended to cancel each other out, and that narcissists were no more or less successful than their modest peers.

Who Would Have Thought?The Language of Music and Workplace Romances

· "Individual Differences in Second-Language Proficiency: Does Musical Ability Matter?" by L. Robert Slevc and Akira Miyake. Psychological Science, Vol. 17, No. 8. Researchers at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Colorado determine that people with musical abilities are better at learning foreign languages.

· "Working Late: Do Workplace Sex Ratios Affect Partnership Formation and Dissolution?" by Michael Svarer. University of Copenhagen Centre for Applied Microeconometrics Working Paper 2006-11. A Danish economist finds that the probability that a worker will get divorced increases in proportion to the prevalence of the opposite sex in his or her workplace but that the gender ratio doesn't help single people find romance -- suggesting that "the workplace constitutes a more important marriage market segment for individuals who are already in a partnership."

Richard Morin is a senior editor at the Pew Research Center. Versions of this column appear at washingtonpost.com andhttp://www.pewresearch.org.