There was a brief media explosion a couple of weeks ago over a study out of Australia that purports to show a link between watching The Simpsons and taking up cigarette smoking.  It’s a terrific piece of media bait, it’s got name recognition and it seems newsworthy.  However, the survey is flimsy, even to an untrained eye.

Basically what they did was take this list of instances of smoking on the show and then rate them as “positive”, “negative” or “neutral”:

Just over a third of instances of smoking (275; 35%) reflected smoking in a negative way, compared with the majority, which reflected smoking in a neutral way (504; 63%) and the minority, which reflected smoking in a positive way (16; 2%).

My first reaction to this was something along the lines of, “How the hell did they find 16 positive mentions of smoking?”.  But then I got to thinking about it and I came up with a few.  How about:

• When Troy McClure and Selma bond over smoking.
• When Jack Larson goes on TV after Fat Tony hijacks the cigarette truck and describes Laramies and “their smooth, good taste”.
• When Buddy Hodges, as Fallout Boy, says he wishes he was old enough to smoke Laramies and Dirk Richter, as Radioactive Man, replies, “Not until you’re sixteen.”
• When Bart is holding the stolen Laramies for Fat Tony the pickup man tells Bart, “Hey kid, you look good with that cigarette, kinda sophisticated.”

So, clearly there are some positive mentions of smoking, even if to see them as positive you need to be blind and deaf to the satire, which, to be fair, little kids might be.  Not being sure, I e-mailed Dr. Guy Eslick, the author of the study.  He kindly wrote back with a couple of examples.

According to Eslick, Lisa being in the Little Miss Springfield pageant was filed under “negative” while Selma giving up smoking to adopt a baby (deep into Zombie Simpsons) was “positive”.  Animals smoking was considered “neutral”.

Then I went to the website (the only thing it shows for free now is the abstract, but the whole thing was there earlier) and actually read it in its entirety.  And though I’m not an expert it seems to me that there are a lot of things that make its conclusion questionable.  They note that the characters seen smoking most often (Patty, Selma, Krusty and Mrs. Krabappel) aren’t exactly the kind of figures children would want to emulate but quickly discount that.  Then there’s the concluding paragraph, laden with footnotes, which doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny.  To show you what I’m talking about, I’m going to fisk it footnote-by-footnote:

Previous studies have highlighted the influence of onscreen use of tobacco by movie stars on adolescents, and the increased likelihood of these adolescents taking up smoking.6

#6 points you to this study publishing in 2001.  The data was based on “a voluntary, self administered survey in October 1996”.  First of all, “voluntary” and “self administered” are not words commonly associated with solid data.  So right off the bat we’ve got a pretty big red flag.  The survey was completed by 632 kids, aged 10-19 and it asked them about their personal smoking habits and then who their favorite movie star was.  The survey then charted those stars’ films from 1994-1996 and measured how many times they smoked on screen.  Kids who chose stars who smoked more often were more likely to have either smoked themselves or have a favorable attitude towards smoking.  In other words, there was a correlation between adolescents who smoked (or tried it or at least didn’t hate the idea of it) and liking movies where movie stars smoked.  It doesn’t address what caused kids to smoke or develop relatively pro-smoking attitudes.  Indeed, it seems almost axiomatic that kids attracted to more “adult” movies where characters are more likely to smoke would also have more “adult” ideas about cigarettes.

Moreover, other research has found that very young children (aged 3–6 years) see, understand and remember cigarette advertising,7

This one is a study from 1991 where kids aged 3-6 were able to match Joe Camel with with a picture of a cigarette.  That’s right, Joe Camel, who hasn’t been on any cigarette advertising since 1997 when The Simpsons was on Season 8.  I’m afraid I just don’t see how this is relevant.

and the use of cartoon characters like Joe Camel by RJR Nabisco has been reported to be more effective in marketing cigarettes to children than to adults.8

This one is also from 1991 and is almost complete bullshit.  Its stated purpose is to determine whether Joe Camel is aimed at “children”.  But the “children” used in this study were all in high school.  Moreover, the “children” were from all over the US, while the “adults” (described here as being over 21) were only from Massachusetts so there are a lot of uncontrolled variables at work here.  I’m not defending the use of Joe Camel, it was sleazy as hell.  But high school kids aren’t exactly “children” the same way 3-6 year olds are “children” and it’s disingenuous to conflate the two.

A more recent study has suggested that children who watch a lot of television are more likely to start smoking at a younger age.9

This one is a 2005 study of high school age kids in Belgium.  Basically it found that the more television a kid watches (and any television would do) the earlier they’re likely to at least try smoking.  It establishes a high correlation, but again makes no effort to study causation.  In fact, here is the final sentence of the abstract, “Further research should examine whether the relationship is causal and whether television acts as a provider of smoking role models or whether it influences smoking attitudes.”  Causation is explicitly not covered by this study.

Indeed, the consensus appears to indicate that there is a causal relationship between exposure to movie and television depictions of smoking and the initiation of smoking among children and adolescents.10

That footnote, supporting the contention that there is a consensus about causation, takes you to a PDF file that is a list of the titles of a number of smoking related research papers.  Going by the titles (I was unable to find the texts free on-line) few to none of them have anything to do with television watching as a motivator for smoking.  Obviously I could be wrong about that, I haven’t read the studies, but the titles (e.g. “Tobacco and the Clinician: Interventions for Medical and Dental Practice” and “Changes in Cigarette-Related Disease Risks and Their Implications for Prevention and Control”) aren’t promising.

If this is true, children and adolescents who watch The Simpsons and observe the characters who smoke cigarettes may be influenced to take up smoking, despite more instances of smoking being reflected in a negative way (35%) or neutral way (63%) than a positive way (2%). Just being exposed to The Simpsons characters smoking in so many episodes may prompt children to consider smoking at an early age.

There’s a lot of caveats and conditionals there: “If this”, “may be”, “despite”, etcetera.  I am not a scientist, nor am I an expert on smoking or child development.  But the evidence here is thin at the very least.

I am also not a smoker, I never have been a smoker, and taking up smoking strikes me as one of the dumber things people do.  But this type of study simply isn’t an effective way to combat it.  All it does is generate vapid media headlines like these:

‘The Simpsons’ ‘promotes smoking’ – The Telegraph in the UK.

Study lights into Simpsons for smoking scenes – CBC.ca in Canada.

D’oh! Simpsons ‘may encourage’ underage smoking – ABC in Australia.

Simpsons encourage youngsters to smoke – The Times of India.

Satire leads to smoking – The Charleston Daily Mail here in the States.

As we can see from the footnotes in the study the evidence that watching The Simpsons (or anything else for that matter) actually causes people to smoke is thin and bordering on non-existent.  But people like to tut-tut smoking and so, without doing any kind of diligence, it’s off to the races to condemn the show.  This is media masturbation, plain and simple.

I’m very sympathetic to public health officials who want to reduce rates of smoking.  Cigarette smoking, and the chemical dependency on nicotine that often accompanies it, imposes very real costs on smoker and non-smoker alike.  But studies like this one amount to little more than sensationalism that allows blowhards to get up on their high horse and decry things they don’t like.*  The Simpson family and the other characters on the show are globally recognizable symbols and so they make for an easy hook on which to hang an article or a diatribe.

The Simpsons shows characters smoking because in real life people smoke.  To pretend otherwise would be denialism.  It doesn’t glamorize smoking, it doesn’t hide the side effects.  If anything The Simpsons highlights the side effects and the negative costs of smoking.  What more can be expected of a media portrayal?

The conclusion here seems to be that every person who has ever smoked a cigarette had first seen someone else smoke, in real life or on screen.  Well, duh.  You’d need to grow up in a pretty isolated bubble to never see anyone smoke a cigarette.  It’s an exercise in circular logic: if no one smoked, then no one would ever see anyone smoking, and thus no one would smoke.  In the real world smoking is something some people choose to take up.  That many of them do so as teenagers, before they’re legally allowed to purchase a pack, is an unavoidable reality.  People pick up a lot of habits, good and bad, when they’re teenagers, always have, always will.

It’s not like smoking is some great mystery.  Anyone old enough to find the idea of it attractive has probably seen thousands of ads for products to help people quit, knows that it’s addictive, and chooses to do so anyway.  The reasons they make that choice (to impress someone, to rebel, just for fun, to experiment, and who knows what else) are probably as variable as the people who make them and the situations in which they live.

In this case we have a well intentioned study that serves as little more than an excuse for pointless demonization.  Smoking is a cultural tradition that was despicably exploited by amoral assholes, but that doesn’t make every effort to combat it noble or smart.

(Wow, this ended up a lot longer than I intended.  No more of this drivel, back to our regular programming.)

*Including, of course, me.