Personality, Social Influence and Cigarette Smoking

In the past decade a tremendous amount of research on smoking has produced relatively little in the way of understanding or successful approaches to modification of smoking. The personality variable of internal vs. external control constitutes a sound logical choice as a possibly useful explanatory characteristic. This was supported by the data. Another, similar variable, designated as fatalism was not determined to be related to smoking. Finally, reference groups and situational influence were investigated and found to be important influences on smoking. From this final analysis it appeared that there may be such a thing as a social smoker who is much more easily persuaded to stop than the psychological need smoker.