Aynne88
Posts: 3873
Joined: 8/29/2008
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Not really DomKen. Malcolm Gladwell covers this extensively in his book "The Tipping Point". Smoking isn't what's cool, it's the fact that smokers are cool.  . In all seriousness, the psychology of it is fascinating. I posted an excerpt explaining his theory below.
"If the tribe is a difficult adversary, the individual smoker is just as thorny. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, "The Tipping Point," did a survey of smokers and discovered that smoking "seemed to evoke a particular kind of childhood memory -- vivid, precise, emotionally charged." Gladwell realized that smoking was associated with one thing to just about everyone: sophistication.
The Tipping-People in smoking are often parents who smoke, or even grandparents. These are the permission-givers who leave an indelible and powerful print on the young smoker-to-be. It may be someone outside of the family, but in some way, that person must have a close connection to the family or the teen, or both. Gladwell quotes this example:
"When I was around nine or ten my parents got an English au pair, Maggie, who came and stayed with us one summer. She was maybe twenty. She was very sexy and wore a bikini at the Campbell's pool. She was famous with the grownup men for doing handstands in her bikini... Maggie smoked, and I used to beg her to let me smoke too."
Furthermore, Gladwell suggests that there is a common personality to hard-core smokers. Research conducted by Hans Eysenck, a psychologist, has shown the hard-core smoker is quintessentially an extrovert who craves excitement, is temperamental (loses his or her temper easily), takes risks, is spontaneous and is both somewhat unreliable and emotional. Moreover hard core smokers have been shown in countless studies to have a greater sex drive than non-smokers, and often have a greater attraction to members of the opposite sex.
Eysenck quotes these statistics: 15 percent of non-smoking white women attending college had had sex, with 55 percent of white women smokers already sexually active. The numbers for men were virtually the same.
Gladwell writes that "the average smoking household spends 73 percent more on coffee and two or three times as much on beer as the average non-smoking household."
Smokers can also be typified according to jobs (or roles). Think of actors, soldiers, hairdressers, models, and more doctors and nurses than makes sense (in their profession).
Gladwell summarizes the heavy smoker's traits as follows:
- defiance
- sexual precocity
- honesty
- impulsiveness
- indifference (to the opinion of others)
- sensation seeking
Here's where it gets interesting. If you consider the above characteristics you have a definition of exactly the personality type that attracts teens. Gladwell points out that Maggie the au pair wasn't cool because she smoked, she smoked because she was cool. He reiterates: "Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool."
_____________________________
As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer, writer and Nobel laureate (1902–1991)
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RE: Diesel fumes more carcinogenic than smoking - 
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