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A sleek, colourful product offers a “sweet, ripe watermelon taste” with a “cool and icy kick” that will “tease your tongue and make your whole mouth quiver with joy”.
The device is compact, light, and portable, and made of “premium quality plastic” that “maintains the integrity of all the flavours to an exceptional level”.
It has an “ergonomic mouthpiece” and promises a feeling of calmness, exhilaration, and complete revitalisation when inhaled.
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
Except this product also contains 50mg of nicotine (around three times the amount in a standard cigarette) and is highly addictive.
The product in question? Vapes.
The last decade has seen significant increases in the use of vapes, especially among adolescents and young adults. Their colourful appearance and promises of revitalisation belie a not-so-hidden truth: they contain toxic chemicals, including carcinogens, and their use has been linked with numerous health harms.
Those who use the products are also three times more likely than those who do not to begin smoking tobacco cigarettes.
Preventing vaping and encouraging cessation have thus become global public health priorities.
The rise in vaping is not a coincidence. As the tobacco industry seeks to safeguard profits in the face of increasingly strict regulations and declining smoking rates, it should come as no surprise that they would begin designing a range of products to addict a new generation to nicotine.
With annual revenues of over half a trillion dollars, tobacco companies have been able to invest heavily in vape advertising and clever product marketing. Forced to package cigarettes in a dull green box, the emergence of vapes has provided tobacco companies with an opportunity to return to the good old days: dressing up their addictive product in playful packaging, bright colours, cartoons, and appealing fonts.
Intuitively, these products are attractive. But research to date has been limited by self-reporting: young people telling us whether they think these products are appealing.
Until now.
The intended effect of vape product marketing is that our brains might be drawn to the products before we can even really think about them. But just how fast does this process happen?
Our research addressed this question using electroencephalography (EEG): a technique that involves placing small electrodes onto the scalp to measure brain activity at a millisecond timescale.
We recorded brain activity from 38 participants aged 17 to 23 years while they viewed images of various vape products for several seconds on a computer screen. We assessed several aspects of their spontaneous approach motivation, including how appealing they thought the vape products were, how curious they were about the products, and how much they wanted to try the products.
Using neural “decoding” techniques, we investigated how fast the brain processes the appeal of the products, because these first impressions contribute substantially to consumer decisions.
Our results showed that participants’ vape approach tendencies could be predicted from brain activity as early as 100-300 ms after product exposure, and then again over a sustained period around 350-800 ms. This was not only the case for participants who reported vaping regularly, but also those who had never vaped before.
In simple terms, our findings indicate that the brain processes the appeal of vape products automatically and rapidly — in less than one second — which is consistent with similar findings in the context of palatable food.
So what?
The main implication of our work is that the rational mind doesn’t have time to kick in until after people already feel the allure of the vaping products. Deliberate decision-making must therefore fight an uphill battle right from the start.
If products are well marketed, with shapes, colours, and the promise of tasty flavours already igniting their effects on young people’s brains, the only way to resist is to overcome this unconscious pull. It is no wonder many young people, who are the target of these marketing strategies, have been tempted.
Our findings might not be totally surprising, nor are they unique to vapes. This is, sadly, how successful marketing works.
However, the explicit demonstration of how fast and automatic the processing of the appeal of well-designed vapes unfolds in young people’s brains should ring alarm bells for policymakers.
Vapes are not a fun, lifestyle product. They are a harmful product addicting thousands of young people who were on their way to living a smoke and nicotine-free life before the tobacco companies saw an opportunity to increase their profits.
First impressions matter. Encouraging people to “think twice” is unlikely to be as effective as creating an environment where these products are not widely available and packaged like candy.
In addition to reducing product availability, we must actively seek to reduce the appeal of vapes (and any other nicotine products the tobacco industry chooses to create) using approaches to policy with demonstrated effectiveness in the context of tobacco control: introducing, maintaining, and enforcing restrictions on advertising and design.
In an environment where the burden to avoid harmful choices is being increasingly placed on the consumer, such regulation is critical to protect the population from vested interests and advancing public health.
Professor Michelle Jongenelis has expertise in health promotion, intervention development and evaluation, behavioural psychology, and clinical psychology. She works across multiple and diverse health-related behaviours including alcohol and tobacco consumption, nutrition, and physical activity.
Professor Stefan Bode is a professor for experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience at New York University Abu Dhabi. His research focuses on various aspects of human decision-making, including health decisions, as well as predicting choice outcomes from brain signals
Dr Daniel Feuerriegel is a cognitive neuroscientist. He uses neuroimaging methods to understand how decision-making is implemented in the circuitry of the human brain.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The statements or opinions expressed in this article reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official policy of the AMA, the MJA or InSight+ unless so stated.
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