Page 262 - The Social Animal

244 The Social Animal

intrinsic motivation for learning in their students or for parents look-
ing for a more effective means than severe punishment for helping
their children learn moral and humane values. Institutions like the
Marine Corps and college fraternities have long employed severe ini-
tiation to increase their members’ commitment to the group. An ex-
79
periment by Danny Axsom and Joel Cooper provides a particularly
compelling example of how dissonance theory can be used to help
solve a difficult personal problem—obesity. Hypothesizing that ex-
pending a great deal of effort to reach an objective would increase a
person’s commitment to that goal, they induced a number of over-
weight women to volunteer for a weight-control program and en-
gaged them in intellectual activities requiring either a large or a small
amount of effort—that was unrelated to losing weight. Over the 4
weeks of the program, only slight weight losses were observed in ei-
ther group. But 6 months and 12 months later, when the experi-
menters contacted the women again, they discovered major
differences: The women who had expended a great amount of effort
had lost an average of 8 pounds, while those who had performed
tasks requiring little effort in the program had not lost any weight.
Changing one’s attitudes to justify one’s behavior not only can have
powerful effects but can also initiate processes that are remarkably
persistent over long periods.

Dissonance and AIDS Prevention

As you know, dissonance makes people uncomfortable. Thus, not
only do we strive to reduce dissonance whenever we experience it,
but in addition, we try to defend ourselves against experiencing dis-
sonance in the first place. One way of remaining oblivious to disso-
nance is by steadfastly refusing to pay close attention to what we are
doing. A good example of this “mindless” behavior can be found in
the sexual behavior of millions of young adults in the face of the
AIDS epidemic. You will recall that I discussed this issue briefly in
Chapter 3. Bear with me as I expand on it here. As you know, hun-
dreds of millions of dollars have been spent on AIDS information
and prevention campaigns in the mass media. Although these cam-
paigns have been reasonably effective in conveying information, they
have not been nearly as successful in preventing people from engag-
ing in risky sexual behavior. For example, although sexually active