Seth Noar
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Public health messages only help if they change what people think and do. Many adults still don't know that alcohol causes cancer, and many teens see vaping as low-risk.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
Psychology
- Topics
health communication
alcohol warnings
warning labels
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2031
What they work on
- Synthesize experimental studies of alcohol warnings in a meta-analysis to estimate their effects on intentions to reduce drinking and related outcomes such as knowledge and risk beliefs.
- Test whether participant age, warning topic (cancer vs. non-cancer) and methodological features such as within- vs. between-subject design moderate how well alcohol warnings work, using meta-analytic moderator analysis.
- Run a factorial randomized trial in US adults who drink, comparing graphic vs. text-only and general vs. specific cancer warnings against the Surgeon General's warning, with a two-week follow-up on drinking behavior.
- Characterize objective features of hundreds of vaping prevention video ads from the Vaping Prevention Resource archive, and identify which features predict perceived effectiveness and unintended effects in an online experiment with 3,000 people aged 13–20.
- Test whether video ads with promising features lower susceptibility to vaping in a four-week, two-arm randomized trial of 1,200 adolescents and young adults, while tracking cigarette smoking outcomes.
More about the research
This research asks which warning and prevention messages actually move people, focusing on alcohol cancer warnings for adults and vaping prevention videos for adolescents and young adults. Both projects pair large reviews of existing evidence with online experiments and randomized controlled trials (RCTs), studies that randomly assign people to different messages and compare outcomes.
Why it matters
Findings could help health agencies and regulators design alcohol warning labels that better inform US adults that drinking raises cancer risk, potentially contributing to lower cancer incidence. The vaping work could guide public health campaigns toward video ads that more effectively reduce vaping susceptibility among teens and young adults, while avoiding messages that backfire by encouraging cigarette smoking.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Leah Ranney
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Examine the legal and regulatory landscape of U.S. cannabis warning labels, through a comprehensive legal analysis and key informant interviews with state cannabis regulators.
Elias Klemperer
University of Vermont, VT·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether very low nicotine content cigarettes reduce cigarettes smoked per day and cigarette dependence among adult dual users of cigarettes and e-cigarettes, in a 12-week double-blind randomized trial.
Pamela Ling
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Adapt the Quit the Hit Toolkit for delivery by youth-serving organizations, assessing their needs and capacity and creating facilitator training materials plus guides for promoting and adopting the program.
The school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 523 research doctorates a year.
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