Highlighting the Collective Harm

Recreational drug use remains a complex public health topic, as many existing interventions have shown inconsistent outcomes. Whereas prior approaches have often focused on individual health risks, we explored whether framing drug use in terms of its broader social context might improve the effectiveness of harm-reduction messaging. Drawing on bounded ethicality and ethical dissonance theory, we hypothesized that socially-framed appeals would reduce intended future drug use by increasing awareness of social costs associated with drugs “moral awareness†), particularly among people who currently use drugs (vs. those who do not). Across two preregistered experiments — including a two-wave time-lagged design in Study 2 — we tested these hypotheses using text-only (Studies 1 and 2) and combined videotext formats (Study 2), in order to separate the effects of message content from those of delivery format. Results showed that socially-framed appeals consistently reduced intended future drug use among current users, regardless of delivery format, but had no significant effect among non-users. However, these effects did not hold over time, and moral awareness did not appear to explain the relationship between the messaging and reduced use intentions. These findings suggest that messaging which contextualizes drug use within its broader social setting may be a useful component of harm-reduction efforts targeting people who currently use drugs. Possible mechanisms through which such appeals may operate are explored in the discussion.