Page 263 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 245

college students are aware of AIDS as a serious problem, only a sur-
prisingly small percentage of them use condoms regularly. The rea-
son for this seems to be that condoms are inconvenient and
unromantic, and remind them of disease—something they do not
want to be reminded of when getting ready to make love. Rather, as
researchers have consistently discovered, there is a strong tendency
for people to go into denial—in this case, to come to believe that,
while AIDS is a problem for other people, they themselves are not
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at risk. If the mass media have been ineffective, is there anything
that can be done?
During the past several years, my students and I have had con-
siderable success in convincing people to use condoms by employing
a variation of the “saying is believing” paradigm discussed earlier in
this chapter. As you will recall, in the typical “saying is believing” ex-
periment, individuals are asked to make a speech advocating a point
of view that runs counter to their own opinion. This arouses disso-
nance; dissonance is then reduced by changing their attitude to bring
it more into line with the position they advocated. How can this par-
adigm be applied to the AIDS epidemic?
As researchers, here is the problem we faced: When it comes to
practicing safe sex, almost everybody believes in the message—that
is, almost everybody believes that AIDS is a danger and that, if peo-
ple are going to be sexually active, using condoms is a good idea—
it’s just that very few of these people who profess these beliefs
actually use condoms regularly. So how do you get a person to expe-
rience dissonance by making an argument favoring the use of con-
doms when they already believe that using condoms is a good idea?
It’s a dilemma. Our solution was actually quite simple: Because peo-
ple were insulating themselves from dissonance via the mechanism
of denial, we attempted to cut through this denial by confronting
people with their own hypocrisy.
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In our experiments, we began by asking college students to
compose a speech describing the dangers of AIDS and advocating
the use of condoms “every single time you have sex.” Every student
was more than willing to do it—because every one of them believed
it was a good idea for sexually active people to use condoms. In one
condition, the students merely composed the arguments. In another
condition, after composing the arguments, the students recited them
in front of a video camera after being informed that the resulting