Thus, future studies also need to examine the characteristics of the confederate and the participant and test participant’s awareness of imitation. The strengths of these two studies are: (1) the experimental design and (2) testing peer imitation and pressure in one design. There are also some shortcomings which should be taken into consideration. First, in our study unfamiliar peers were the confederates, but peer relations usually centre on familiar companions of a similar age, including (best) friends, siblings,

etc. It would be interesting to test whether this website smoking by familiar peers (e.g., best friend, sibling) affects student smoking differently compared to smoking by strangers. This is difficult to examine in experimental studies; observational studies would be more appropriate. Second, our sample is restricted to smoking continuation among daily smokers. Thus, our findings may be helpful BMS-387032 purchase for smoking cessation programs but we need to replicate in future studies whether this also applies to preventing

and discouraging smoking initiation and experimentation. Third, this experimental study is conducted in a camper van focusing on peer dyads. However, the impact of active and passive peer influence may vary in different environment and setting (e.g., work setting, school setting, or other public places) and may depend on the number of peers and smoking norms in that specific setting. Fourth, in this study Calpain design cigarettes were freely available in order to make the condition where the confederate offered cigarettes but smoked zero cigarettes credible.

However, this may not have biased our findings because the cigarettes were freely available in all conditions but may explain why in this study all participants smoked at least one cigarette. Finally, we did not measure smoking topography in detail, but only looked at cigarette frequency. Previous studies showed that imitation did not affect puff frequency per cigarette, percentage of tobacco burned, puff duration, and average inter-puff interval, but only influenced the macro-measures of cigarette frequency and inter-cigarette interval (Antonuccio and Lichtenstein, 1980 and Miller et al., 1979). We did not include the latter smoking outcome in this present study because the number of participants would decrease in this analysis, and therefore also the power to detect significant findings. Young adults seem to continue to smoke due to passive peer influence rather than active peer influence. Young adults strongly imitate smoking in mere interaction with complete strangers regardless of being offered a cigarette or not. Anti-smoking policy could probably target this passive peer influence by removing smoking models from smoking cessation campaigns, by banning smoking in schoolyards, and by increasing awareness of imitating the smoking of others.