Does regulation itself shape what people believe about nicotine and vaping? And why do so many people believe that nicotine causes cancer and other diseases?
In this GFN Science Lab presentation, economist Fernando Briseño explores the relationship between tobacco regulation and public perceptions of nicotine risk. Drawing on a multinational survey experiment conducted in Mexico, Argentina and Chile, the research examines whether informing people about the regulatory status of vaping products influences how harmful they believe these products to be.
The study compares perceptions across countries with different regulatory environments and investigates beliefs about the relative harm of vaping and smoking, nicotine addiction, and the health risks attributed to nicotine.
Transcription:
GFN Science Lab 4 — Fernando Briseño
2026-06-05 · 11:30-13:00 (Europe/Warsaw) · Global Forum on Nicotine 2026
Barnaby Page 0:00:10
For our last presentation today, we have Fernando Briseño, who is an economist from Mexico, who is going to address the topic of whether regulation itself changes what people believe about nicotine.
Video 0:00:22
Ask a smoker a simple question. What causes cancer in cigarettes? Many will answer it's nicotine. Yet, nicotine is not what makes cigarettes deadly. So, why millions of people believe this? My name is Fernando Briseño. I work with Movimiento Pro Vecino to find an answer to this question. Across many countries, people believe nicotine itself is highly dangerous.
Yet, the scientific literature is very clear. There is the harm caused by combustion and there's the role of nicotine as an addictive substance. Despite decades of research, this misunderstanding persists, which raises an important question. Why do people believe what they believe about nicotine risk? Most research on tobacco has focused on behaviour. Who smokes? Who quits?
Who switches products? But much less attention has been put on belief formation, preference formation. What if regulation has a larger effect beyond controlling the markets? What if it also signals risk to the general public? We know very little about how regulation itself may influence the public perception of risk.
If a product is banned, restricted or tightly regulated, people may interpret this as a signal that this product is extremely dangerous. Our research investigates this possibility. Our question is very simple. Does regulatory information change how people perceive the risks of nicotine products?
To study this, we designed a multinational survey experiment conducted in three countries. Mexico, Argentina and Chile. These three countries have very different regulatory environments for vaping products, so this will be particularly useful in how we build our experiment. Participants in this survey are randomly assigned to two groups.
The control group answers questions about perceived risks of cigarettes, electronic cigarettes and nicotine itself. The treatment group receives one additional element. Before answering these questions, they are shown a short informational card describing the current regulatory status of vaping products in their country. The information is factual and concise.
It simply explains whether these products are banned, restricted, or regulated. By comparing responses between the two groups, we can identify the causal effect of regulatory knowledge on perceived risk. The questionnaires harmonized across all three countries, allowing direct cross-country comparison.
The pilot testing, ethical review, and multiple rounds of refinement were conducted to ensure that participants clearly understand the experimental stimulus, and the fieldwork for this study has just begun. Why this matters? This will be the first cross-country baseline of nicotine risk perception in Latin America. But the implications go beyond the region.
If regulatory environments influence how people interpret risk, then policy is not only shaping markets, it is also shaping beliefs about nicotine itself. So this has implications for public health communication, regulatory design, and harm reduction strategies. Our results will help us solve a fundamental question.
When people misunderstand nicotine, is it a failure of science communication? Or could policy itself be shaping what people believe? We will be very happy to present the results of this multinational experiment at the GFN 2026. Thank you.
Fernando Briseño 0:04:53
First of all, this study was funded by Global Action to End Smoking. Global Action had no role in the planning or execution of this study. And essentially, that's the previous message before entering the presentation. Just to retake this, our key question is, how does information about regulation shift perceptions of vaping risk?
We conducted a randomized survey experiment in three countries, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, with several thousands of observations. and under very different regulatory regimes. In Mexico, the sale of vaping devices is not allowed. However, consumption is allowed. In Argentina and Chile, both sales and consumption are allowed.
However, Argentina changed its regulation just in May 4. And this is incredible because it It was during the time we were collecting the data. So essentially, we have a natural experiment within our data collection. Our outcome variables were the perceived relative harm of vaping devices versus cigarettes. We asked people, which one do you think is more harmful?
Also, the relative addiction of both products, and also perceived deaths. We asked people, out of 100 people, how many think how many would you think would die because of vaping or because of smoking? And we measured that.
So as previously explained, we divided our people in control and treatment group, the people that received the treatment were informed about the regulatory status of electronic cigarettes or vaping devices.
This was conducted in a nationally representative sample, and this is very interesting because it is essentially doing a survey with Uber drivers, with people that are selling in the market, They are not well informed about the policy or even about the vaping devices.
So the way in which people form their beliefs was something that we were, let's say, normal people, not students in the universities. That was a very important question for us. And we obtained this from data. So let me show you the many things we found out. First of all, in Mexico and Argentina, the vaping devices were already being prohibited from years ago.
And this different regulatory setting compared to Chile, in which the vaping devices are, the sales are allowed, shows us that in these two very restrictive regimes, people are more prone to think that vaping devices are more harmful or much more harmful.
However, in Chile, in which regulation is more more lenient, more permissive towards vaping, people are more inclined to think that vaping devices are as harmful as cigarettes, and many more inclined to think that they are less harmful.
What we found very interesting from this study is that the people in the survey usually have a very negative inclination towards electronic cigarettes. Also, what we obtained, and this is also very interesting, is a measure of misinformation about nicotine in these countries, particularly We ask three questions. Do you think nicotine is addictive?
Also, we ask whether they believe that nicotine causes cancer and whether they believe that nicotine causes other diseases such as... cardiovascular disease, diabetes, et cetera. So the first ones, which is the correct question, should be that yes, people were correct in their appreciation about nicotine.
However, in the other two questions in which the scientific answer to this is no, Essentially, and remember that this is a statistically valid sample in these countries, people in Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, by a very large majority, think that nicotine causes cancer and other diseases.
So this is, for the first time, a clear measure of misinformation in Latin America about nicotine. So, in general, returning to the results of the experiment, we found that the treatment was not significant in many cases. Particularly, we measured this with the levels of of relative addiction, people who think that vaping is much less harmful, less harmful, equally harmful.
And we measured the effect from showing them the information. The only group in which we found a small effect was in Mexico, in people that already thought that vaping devices were harmful. when we showed them that they were regulated and they were prohibited in sales, they shifted and many more people thought it was even more harmful.
So, in general, we are not finding this effect of regulation on belief formation and in Economic terms, this is what we call the expressive function of regulation. We are not finding much evidence about this. However, even a negative result is useful when conducting this kind of research.
In general, this is the first homogeneous standardized vaping risk perception study across multiple countries in Latin America. We found a very interesting heterogeneity in these risk perceptions in the places in which the regulation is more accepting about vaping devices. People tend to think of them as less harmful.
Also, we found that misperceptions about nicotine are broad across examining countries. We also found that this knowledge about regulation does not impact the perception significantly. And for the future, we are still receiving data. We are still within the process.
What we really want to check, and we will be very happy to share later our results, is this natural experiment that occurred during an artificial experiment, which is quite funny. And also, what we found, and this is a topic of causality, do these patterns reflect the law adapting to the existing beliefs?
Maybe countries adopt this because people are thinking negatively about vaping devices, or is it the other way? We should investigate this because one of the key The key problem an economist is always finding trouble to sleep is causality. So we hope to dig into that later. So this is the presentation. I think these are very interesting results for the region.
And also, it may be extensive to other lower and middle income countries.
Barnaby Page 0:13:34
incredibly lucky to have been conducting this research just at the time, literally in the last few weeks that Argentina has gone through a significant regulatory change. I guess it's fairly obvious that one of the reasons for these misconceptions is that people don't distinguish between nicotine and combustible cigarettes.
As we all know, for decades and decades, combustible cigarettes were the main way to consume nicotine in most societies. And so if you talked about one, it meant the other. They were almost synonymous. And now, of course, they're different. But people don't always grasp that. How do you feel that that might be changed?
Changing that perception through regulation obviously is not successful. Simply saying something in terms of what the law is doesn't seem to change people's opinions. So does it come through the educational system? Does it come through the medical profession? I don't know what your ideas might be there.
Fernando Briseño 0:14:41
That's precisely our ideas. In our organisation, Movimiento Pro Vecino, we think that education, and maybe not through the formal education system. Maybe it's through the action of civil society that people could be informed about nicotine and alternative products to smoking.
From this survey, I was just going through the data, and we have a question after asking people, do you think vaping devices are more harmful than cigarettes? We asked them immediately, why do you think this? The majority think vaping devices are more harmful Number one, because they contain unknown chemicals.
But it's a very abstract, very natural reaction based on lack of knowledge. So if this knowledge goes to them through many channels, it could be social media. It could be through the news organisations. But it could be either by government initiative or it could be through civil society that they get informed, these perceptions may be subject to change.