Attitudes towards tobacco smoking have changed throughout the history. In its beginnings, it was present in rituals, later the Europeans began to use it. Its acceptance differed based on cultural environment; sometimes as a deviant act sometimes as sublime or as a symbol of emancipated women. Today, when smoking is well known but increasingly limited and controlled, its social status is unsure. We try to understand society's view of smoking via theory of stigma. Our main interest is how stigmatization affects the stigmatized user; smoker. Self-stigmatization has an effect on personality and self-perception; namely self-efficacy in self-esteem. But this is not always the case. The distinction between specific and general self-efficacy is important. Emphasis is on model of self-stigmatization introduced by Corrigan. To empirically identify the self-stigmatization of smokers, we designed a self-stigma model that examines the association of different phases of self-stigmatization with negative consequences for self-efficacy and self-esteem. We conducted a survey on a non-target, non-representative sample of smokers. Negative correlation was show for self-esteem in general self- efficacy, but not for specific self- efficacy related to smoking cessation, even thaw we measured in two methodologically different ways.
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