Previous research indicates that a significant difference can exist between perceived and actual rates of smoking.  Two theories that may explain the misperceptions between actual and perceived rates of a target behavior are the False Consensus Effect and the False Uniqueness Effect.  The False Consensus effect refers to the tendency of individuals to overestimate the percentage of people who “do what they do, and like what they like”.  On the other hand, the False Uniqueness Effect refers to the tendency of individuals to underestimate the percentage of people who “do what they do, and like what they like” (Pollard, Freeman, Ziegler, Hersman & Goss, 2000).  In the present study, we tested the applicability of these theories to misperceptions regarding smoking.

Five hundred St. Lawrence students were mailed a questionnaire that contained questions on students’ own smoking behavior, their perceptions of other’s smoking behavior, and the evaluation of attitude statements on topics that have been found to be associated with smoking behavior.  Previous research suggests that misperceptions in college students may be attributable to the False Consensus Effect, which would suggest that non-smokers would perceive more people as non-smokers.  However, we hypothesized that nonsmokers would exhibit the False Uniqueness Effect because they would desire to see their “good” behavior as unique.  Smokers, on the other hand, would exhibit the False Consensus Effect because they would desire to see their “negative” behavior as common.  As a result, both groups would misperceive the rates for non-smoking behavior in the same direction—i.e., lower than they actually are.

Preliminary analyses indicate support for our hypotheses.  When we compared the rates of self-reported smoking behavior to the perceived rates of smoking behavior, we found that overall, students underestimated the percentage of non-smokers (actual=65.5% vs. perceived=30.47%) and overestimated the percentage of social smokers (actual=13.1% vs. perceived=30.47%) and regular smokers (actual=9.5% vs. perceived=32.29%).  These misperceptions did not vary according to the smoking status of the student.  Additional analyses are being conducted to explore further the support for the hypothesis.  These findings also suggest that a social norms campaign which makes more salient the actual, large number of St. Lawrence students who are non-smokers may be effective in reducing smoking behavior.