coffee or cigs?
February 13, 2009
Coffee vs. Cigarettes.
Which is the lesser evil between those two? Well, suppose most people will choose coffee, as it can keep a person awake and probably wouldn’t kill him or her. Cigarettes, on the other hand, is deadly as it can become an addiction, and basically eats off a person. Well, in my opinion, both is just as bad, and one of the main reason is due to perception.
What forms one’s perception? Perception occurs, based on a person’s selection of information, how a person organise his or her information and how one interpret the information given. Hence, in the case of coffee and cigarettes, most will select the information that is lasting; consequently, ending up in a selection flaw called ‘Persistent First Impression’. Which is to say, what a person first experienced with smokers were generally negative (ie. education, government warnings);hence, less intense and memoriable when compared to coffee. Perhaps, the person found the smoke to be choking and replusive. Then, the negative impression of cigarettes and smokes stays in the person mind based singluarly on how the he or she first remembered; therefore, greatly contributing to his or her perception on the detest of cigarettes.
Also, organising the various information plays a part in the person too. In this case, on may have already built up a personal construct, bend on prototyping cigarettes. One may think that only social delinquients smokes (again, based of personal experiences), hence fitting them into prototypes. Thus, one may think that only those who fit in the prototype mentioned above smokes.
Following that, the interpretation of information is vital to forming one’s perception. With the rampant governemny campeigns on the adverse effects of smoking, and with the ban of smoking in many public venues (schools, 50m from public buildings, 10m from bus stops), it really does not take a geinus to interpret the meaning conveyed. However, there are virtually zero reports on the ill effects of consuming coffee in the past year. Hence, one may think that there are no negative effects of consuming coffee.
However, did you know that about over 80% of Singaporeans drink coffee each day? 50% of those who drink, will have an headache when coffee is taken away from them. Hence, it means that half of those who consume coffee are heavily addicted to caffiene, without even realising it!
Compare these figures to the percentage of Singaporeans who are smokers -12 percent according to the National Health Survey in 2007. Out of the 12%, only 40% considered themselves as addicted and need to have a puff to get through the day.
Just by comparing the two, centris paribus, one can see that perception plays a huge part in choosing, and how a person interacts with the environment. We can also tell how the government is trying to influence in one’s perception, in the case of cigarettes and coffee.
What do you think?
Which do you preceive as the lesser evil between these two?
I agree and disagree. I agree because I can argue a case that for mortals like me, we are dealing with perception of truth and not truth itself. So coffee or cigarette is an issue of perception.
On the other hand, drinking coffee affects me. But if I smoke, it affects me and those who inhale my cigarette smoke. I bet that most people would rather kiss a person who has just drank a cup of coffee than someone who has just smoked a cigarette. You get my drift …
I will say coffee is the better out of the two. Cigs pollute the air and cause lung cancer and usually can be linked to the rotten eggs as we can see from cognitive schemata. Yup. Cigar is expensive and easily be addicted.
Coffee has good n bad points. The good point will be able to stay awake and finish any unfinished homework maybe COM101 blog =p Bad point is addiction and can cause cancer too.
Personally I don’t subscribe to both, as I’m caffeine intolerant, and I can’t stand cigarette smoke. I feel it’s a case of to each his own, perhaps the idea of smoking might be the more intolerable one, but I feel that once people actually gets used to the idea of smoking it’s probably the same? In an ideal world both should be gotten rid of i guess, but since that’s impossible in the world today, we shall just have to make do with them yea?
I suppose addiction to anything is generally perceived as bad and based on information that is received. This information of course depends on the science of the day. Saying that, to suggest that coffee might be in fact worse than cigarettes might be stretching it a bit too far.
As with most science, effects observable tend to lead to more logical conclusions. Both cigarettes and coffee have both been around for some time, and it has been observed that people who have smoked for a long time die terrible deaths (later called lung cancer) while long drinkers of coffee have no observable terrible deaths. It would then be logical to conclude that smoking is worse, though both are addictive.
Even if the government or scientific community were to give us information that coffee is worse and try to persuade us so, I think few would believe it. Thus, I would say that perception is not just a view formed based on whatever information is given, but that it is formed when that information also aligns with what we have logically concluded in the first place.