Simply asking questions about health behaviors increases both healthy and unhealthy behaviors

Several recent lines of survey research demonstrate that the simple act of asking a question can lead to changes in a respondent's subsequent behavior. In the current research we asked college students their likelihood to either (i) exercise or (ii) use illegal drugs in the coming 2 months. After 2 months we asked the same college students to report their exercising and illegal drug use behaviors. The findings provide further evidence that these “question–behavior” effects occur for socially normative personal health behaviors, a domain that should have high levels of respondent vigilance and defensive processing. Of more concern, we demonstrate that when a question is asked about a socially non‐normative health behavior (i.e., illegal drug use), instead of decreases in the behavior we see increased rates of the non‐normative behavior.

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