Quote:
|
Anybody...... this is a call out to anybody in these forums to please answer honestly..... "HAVE ANY OF YOU EVER STARTED SMOKING BECAUSE OF A MOVIE?"
|
You're question necessitates it being a conscious realization of the influence of the movie. I think most people would agree that it would have a mostly subconscious impact.
One example: Kid's might get the
feeling that smoking can't be 'that bad', and that their teachers or parents are just being control freaks (as kids often think their parents are, when parents are really just trying to protect their kids) - if they see characters they aspire to or admire, smoking.
Of the people who started smoking because of a movie, probably only a very tiny portion of them
knew that it was because of the film. They probably attributed it to other factors such as a combination of peer pressure and teen angst - that influence may not have been as effective if it wasn't for the movie creating an unconscious feeling of smoking being 'cool'.
In alot of cases, the people influenced would be completely clueless about the movie's effect.
Do we agree that cigarette companies
pay to have smoking in movies?
Do we agree that cigarette companies wouldn't repeatedly spend millions (billions?) of dollars like that if they couldn't witness an effect on
some people - that increased their sales?
Quote:
|
Statistics if accurate and true, should hold relatively accurate to real life examples, and if not one single person here out of a random picking has never had an urge to smoke based on what a movie showed..... then one has to question the stats.
|
Very true, if enough evidence in real-life is present to the contrary, the stat may be false - however, tiny sample sizes are not proof either, all we do by making this assertion, is create ambiguity.
No volconvo member being able to say that they
consciously decided to start smoking because they saw it in a movie - is not at all proof, that in a population 5,000,000* times as big as the aprox. 100** reading this thread on volconvo, there aren't people who started smoking because of it.
*(Include Europe and Canada, they watch US movies to)*
**(generous if you look at the number of views of this thread, that credit single users with multiple views) **
Also people might be embarassed about admitting such a thing. "Why did you start smoking?" "I saw Brad Pitt do it in my favorite movie", doesn't sound all that intelligent.
Also consider this, the average person isn't as smart as the crowd volconvo attracts. Smarter people are less likely to do something as stupid as
consciously start smoking because of
the specific reason they saw an actor/actress do it in a movie.
So even if the sample on volconvo doesn't have a member who can admit to having
consciously decided that 'because a movie character smoked, they will to', this sample is in the wrong place, because the people who would be affected by it would have been much dumber.