QUESTION ON BEHAVIOR MAY SPARK BEHAVIOR IN QUESTION

Study Prompts Concerns About Provoking Dangerous, Illegal Acts

WASHINGTON - Simply asking college students who are inclined to take
drugs about their illegal-drug use in a survey may increase the
behavior, according to newly published findings that are making some
researchers understandably nervous.

"We ask people questions, and that does change behavior," study
co-author Gavan Fitzsimons, a marketing professor at Duke University's
Fuqua School of Business, said Thursday. The provocative effect, he
added, can be "much greater than most of us would like to believe."

People also exercised more after they were asked how much exercise
they got, Fitzsimons said. And in a follow-up experiment, students who
were asked about skipping classes and drinking cut class more and drank more.

Since the study appeared in the June issue of the academic journal
Social Influence, Fitzsimons' research team has fielded calls from
health practitioners concerned that asking patients about depression
and possible thoughts of suicide might make matters worse. Other
researchers suspect that people polled in political campaigns become
more politically active.

For their study, Fitzsimons and co-researchers Patti Williams, a
marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia,
and Lauren Block of Baruch College in New York split a sample of 167
undergraduate students into two groups.

Those in the first group were asked how likely they were to use drugs
in the next two months. Those in the second were asked how likely they
were to exercise in the next two months.

Two months later, both were asked how often they'd exercised and how
often they'd used drugs. Students in the first group said they'd used
drugs an average of 2.8 times. Students in the second group, who
hadn't been asked about drug use two months before, said they'd used
drugs an average of 1.1 times.

When it came to exercise, students who'd been asked earlier about
their exercise plans said they'd exercised about one-third more than
students who hadn't been asked.

To assemble two balanced groups, the researchers initially asked the
students about prior drug use and their attitudes toward it. This
enabled them to conclude that the increased use was "only true for
people who were already predisposed or in the at-risk group for drug
use," Fitzsimons said. "People who never used drugs just had their
negative opinions cemented."

Cliff Zukin, the president of the American Association of Public
Opinion Research in Lenexa, Kan., which sets standards for the field,
called the study eye-opening. He wondered whether college-student drug
use might be easily provoked, which would suggest that the effect is
milder than it seems.