Hello all. I hope all is well with you. Today I will be talking about some BE initiatives in Japan and how they have aided in the smoking cessation. Hope you enjoy!
Japan’s anti-smoking campaign of 2023 addressed the hardwired habit of nicotine addiction in its “most smoked-in country” population, using principles from the field of behavioral economics. For decades, the Japanese public health sector had attempted to mitigate the impact of smoking through health education and other, largely ineffective, behavior-change strategies. Campaign 2023 was a public and private sector partnership, a nationally coordinated event. The timing was critical, with the Summer Olympics coming up in 2024. Costs associated with smoking and tobacco use are a public health and economic concern in Japan, and the international image associate with a heavily smoking populace is likewise problematic. Still, the public sector is working to reach a smoking rate of 10 percent or less by 2025.
Several strategies based on behavioral economics informed the campaign’s design. Above all, it used what is called a “commitment device.” This is a fancy term for a tool that helps individuals stick to a plan. Smokers signed contracts with the government indicating they would stop smoking by a certain date. For some, the contracts were simple but necessary tools to help them mentally make the shift from smoking to non-smoking. For others, the contracts were just more words promising “you can do it!” The government’s orders to this campaign, however, did not only serve to dictate to smokers a kind of reenactment of what Health & Welfare figures had done in 1953. Alongside the performative aspect of this campaign, there was the getting-past-the-waiting-list aspect. The campaign asked public figures, celebrities, and community leaders who had successfully quit smoking to tell their stories.
The campaign took on another component when it dipped its toes into social psychology to find ways of making “healthy choices” the default or more convenient option. One of the most significant smoking-related public health victories in recent years has come from this use of nudges. Smokers in Japan enjoy their addiction in smoking rooms, and even though you can find these samples of a pre-apocalypse landscape in places like Tokyo and Osaka, the campaign has been so successful that public health officials dropped the bombshell last April that the national “health hazard” associated with tobacco has dropped. Rates of smoking across Japan fell by 20 percent in just one year, with the most significant reduction in a tobacco-soaked youth culture that has long idolized smoking artists like Kenji Miyazawa.
The successful anti-smoking trend in Japan is beginning to pay off in the form of fewer people lighting up. For many years, smoking was a part of the Japanese way of life. Like a bad cousin intent on making things miserable, it followed you everywhere — even into doctors’ offices. But now, led by the World Health Organization, the Japanese government has taken a strong stand against smoking. And the number of smokers in this country is falling as if it were on the stock market. The anti-smoking movement in Japan serves up a buffet of lessons and strategies from which other Asian countries with a similarly dubious smoking habit can benefit.
In addition, the campaign affects other facets of public health in addition to smoking. The commitment-device, social-proof, and nudge principles could be used just as effectively to work on other health problems, like obesity, problem drinking, and sedentary living. As governments and health organizations look for ever more creative ways to push the public health in a positive direction, the integration of behavioral economics into public health policy seems bound to play a bigger role.
Sources:
- Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan. (2023). “Behavioral Economics and Smoking Cessation: Japan’s Strategy.” Retrieved from mhlw.go.jp
- The Japan Times. (2023). “How Japan Reduced Smoking Rates Using Behavioral Economics.” The Japan Times Health Section.
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