Peer Signals and “Judgement-Free” Messaging: Reframing Norms and Control in Young Adults’ Smoking Cessation

Young adults' nicotine use increasingly spans both cigarettes and ecigarettes, complicating cessation and reshaping how social cues and platform logics influence health decisions.While the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) highlights attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control as drivers of behavioural intentions, tobacco communication often merges these levers without clarifying how peer signals and judgement-free messaging operate in algorithmically mediated environments.This paper adopts a qualitatively led mixed-methods design to explore how digital cues -such as like counts, comment tone, and influencer framing -together with empathetic, non-judgemental language, reframe social norms and perceived control in young adults' cessation sense-making.Integrating TPB with media socialisation theory and relational dialectics, it develops a framework for understanding the tensions between safety and authenticity, and between autonomy and conformity.A purposive interview sample of twenty young adults aged eighteen to twenty-four will be paired with a survey of approximately two hundred respondents to contextualise normative perceptions, perceived behavioural control, and future-self continuity.The analysis isolates normative and efficacy levers without claiming causality, proposing that judgement-free messaging enhances perceived control while peer signals recalibrate subjective norms, particularly among dual users and socially situated smokers.The findings are expected to inform message design and platform-based evaluation strategies for campus and social-media health campaigns.