Towards a Drug Free America: Guilt Processing and Drug Prevention

Abstract

Developing a greater understanding of how drug prevention public service announcements can help individuals make more informed socially desirable choices is the focus of this work. Specifically, the roles of guilt proneness and anticipated guilt are explored through two different studies. We demonstrate that individuals with higher levels of guilt proneness tend to exhibit greater intended message compliance across a variety of drug prevention message appeals. Additionally, we are able to extend our understanding of anticipated guilt and show that as anticipated guilt is increased, irrespective of guilt proneness, expected message compliance is also increased. Lastly, we show that compliance is related to risk in that as the perceived risk associated with drug use increases, so does guilt and compliance.