Many parents and child advocates already knew this from sheer common sense.  Along the same lines as telling the kids that you made cookies and stay out of the cookie jar (or candy jar).

The pharmaceutical industry is no dummy.  They already knew this one.  But people like ‘expert opinion’ and I guess they needed a study on that. 

Marketing professors did a study and discovered this:

These findings should serve as a warning to public policy and health behavior researchers who routinely use surveys as a method to study risky behaviors, the researchers say.

“We expected to find that students asked about exercise would exercise more, because that fits with past research regarding people’s motivation to conform with socially desirable behaviors,” said marketing professor Gavan Fitzsimons of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. “What we weren’t expecting to see is that the students asked about drug use actually reported more, not less, use of illegal drugs.”

And of course, one of the plans for the Blueprint gang of the current governor’s is this; displayed in an IL House Resolution:

RESOLVED, That we recommend that every young person should  be screened once during childhood or adolescence to identify mental illness and prevent suicide;

Every Young Person. 

Continuing with the article:

“We’re working hard right now to better understand when questions may lead to these negative side effects,” Fitzsimons said. “For example, it appears that warning respondents in advance that asking questions can influence behavior may be a successful way to inoculate them against the potentially harmful effects of asking questions about risky behaviors.”

How dopey is this?  Here’s the solution. 

Don’t ask the flippin’ questions!