How Cannabis Use Status Affects Responses to Anti- Cannabis Messages

Background: The current study examined how cannabis use status impacts cognitive and emotional reactions to public health campaigns about cannabis, and the degree to which these reactions influence message likeability and attitudes about cannabis-related harms. Methods: In a between-subjects design, 252 subjects recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk viewed six real-world cannabis education messages: three message themes (cognitive ability, driving, and health harms) from each of two real-world public campaigns. Subjects answered questions measuring their cognitive and emotional reactions to each message as well as message likeability and harm perceptions of cannabis. Analyses examined the mediating effects of message responsiveness on the association between baseline cannabis use (user vs non-user) with indices of liking and harm. Results: For all three message themes, informativeness ratings mediated the effect of cannabis user status on the outcomes of perceived harmfulness and message likeability. Specifically, cannabis users perceived cannabis as less harmful and reported all messages as less likeable compared to non-users, partly because they perceived the messages to be less informative than non-users. Surprisingly, users found some of the messages to be more pleasant, which was associated with increased perceptions of harm and message liking compared to non-users. Conclusions: Cannabis education campaigns that take into account differences in emotional and cognitive reactions by use experience, rather than use a “one size fits all” approach, could possibly maximally impact likeability and harm perceptions of these messages.