Binge drinking is prevalent among college students, largely driven by their tendency to overestimate peers’ drinking behaviors, which leads them to normalize their own consumption patterns. While motivational interviewing has proven effective in reducing binge drinking, it requires substantial resources for large-scale implementation, making alternative messaging strategies like narrative and inoculation theory more practical for campus-wide interventions. However, research on narrative and inoculation messaging for college drinking remains limited. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the effectiveness of inoculation and narrative messages in protecting students’ preexisting negative attitudes about binge drinking from pro-drinking influences.
The study recruited 135 undergraduate students from three large U.S. universities, using a three-phase experimental design. In Phase 1, participants completed questionnaires assessing demographics, initial attitudes toward binge drinking, and topic involvement. One week later in Phase 2, participants were randomly assigned to view one of three treatment messages: narrative, inoculation, or control, after which they completed measures of transportation, character identification, perceived threat, and counterarguing. In Phase 3, conducted one week later, participants received a counter-attitudinal persuasive message promoting binge drinking and completed final assessments of attitudes toward binge drinking. Attitudes were measured using a 7-item, 15-point bipolar scale, with change scores calculated by subtracting Phase 1 from Phase 3 attitudes. Data were analyzed using ANOVA to evaluate differences between treatment groups.
The findings revealed that narrative messages elicited significantly greater transportation and character identification compared to non-narrative messages, while inoculation messages produced significantly higher perceived threat and counterarguing output than control messages, validating the experimental manipulations. The results showed that participants’ negative attitudes toward binge drinking significantly weakened after exposure to pro-binge-drinking messages in the control condition. A univariate ANOVA revealed significant main effects for both treatment condition and counter-attitudinal message type on attitude change, with narrative counter-attitudinal messages being more persuasive than rhetorical ones. However, the narrative treatment message did not significantly differ from the control message in protecting attitudes against persuasive attack. Participants receiving inoculation messages showed significantly greater resistance to counter-attitudinal persuasion compared to control participants. Furthermore, the inoculation messages were significantly more effective than narrative messages in protecting initial negative attitudes toward binge drinking from persuasive challenges.
Takeaway: Inoculation messages demonstrated greater efficacy than narrative and control conditions in preserving college students’ attitudes against pro-binge-drinking persuasion, indicating their potential utility as a protective intervention approach.