Greenwashed Cigarette Ad Text and Imagery Produce Inaccurate Harm, Addictiveness, and Nicotine Content Perceptions: Results From a Randomized Online Experiment.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide).

The researchers conducted an online experiment with 1504 participants ages 18-29, randomized to view a cigarette ad manipulated for presence-absence of a combination of four different greenwashing techniques: greenwashed ad text, greenwashed ad imagery, recycled paper ad background, and image of greenwashed cigarette pack.

Participants rated perceived absolute harm, relative harm to other cigarettes, absolute addictiveness, relative addictiveness, and relative nicotine content.

Why It Was Studied

The tobacco industry has a long history of circumventing regulations to present their products, inaccurately, as less harmful.

This study assesses the effect of some common greenwashing tactics on consumer product perceptions.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 1504 participants were involved.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were teenagers, young adults and adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized study.

Because people in this Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

What Was Measured

This study assesses the effect of some common greenwashing tactics on consumer product perceptions.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Tobacco Products, Nicotine, Advertising, Tobacco Industry and Perception.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) in 1504 participants.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

Results are reported in around 9 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2025 (Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco), a journal based in England.

More context: the Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) compound page, all human trials.