Impacts of Alcohol Warning Labels: An Online Experiment

This study aims to determine which topics in alcohol warning labels are most effective at making US adults who consume alcohol want to drink less alcohol, which topics best remind consumers of alcohol's harms, and which topics are most likely to teach consumers something new. The survey research company NORC at the University of Chicago will recruit a sample of 1,000 US adults ages 21+ who consumed alcohol at least one time per week during the past 4 weeks. Participants will complete a within-subjects online randomized experiment in which they view and rate messages shown on alcohol containers. Participants will rate each message on perceived message effectiveness (primary outcome), reminding of alcohol's harms (secondary outcome), and learning something new (secondary outcome). These tasks will be repeated for 10 messages, each with a different topic. There will be 9 warning topics (i.e., topics about alcohol's harms) and 1 control topic (i.e., neutral topic not about alcohol's harms). In this within-subjects experiment, the survey will present the topics in random order and participants will view 1 of 2 messages for each topic.