Page 264 - The Social Animal

246 The Social Animal

videotape would be played to an audience of high-school students as
part of a sex-education class. In addition, prior to making the speech,
half the students in each condition were made mindful of their own
past failures to use condoms by making a list of the circumstances in
their own lives when they found it particularly difficult, awkward, or
“impossible” to use condoms.
Essentially then, the participants in one condition—those who
made a video for high-school students after having been made mind-
ful of their own failure to use condoms—were in a state of high dis-
sonance.This was caused by becoming aware of their own hypocrisy;
that is, they were fully aware of the fact that they were preaching be-
havior to high-school students that they themselves were not prac-
ticing. To remove the hypocrisy and maintain their self-esteem, they
would need to start practicing what they were preaching. And that is
exactly what we found. At the close of the experiment, students in
the hypocrisy condition were far more likely to purchase condoms
(on display on a table outside the experimental room) than in any of
the other conditions. Furthermore, several months later, a large pro-
portion of the students in this condition reported that they were
using condoms regularly.

Dissonance and Water Conservation A few years ago,
while central California was suffering through one of its chronic
water shortages, water was being rationed in the city of Santa Cruz—
where my university is located. On my campus, the administration
was trying desperately to find ways to induce students to conserve
water by taking shorter showers. Direct appeals to the students’ val-
ues regarding conservation had an effect—but a small one. As men-
tioned in Chapter 2, several years earlier, we had obtained a
somewhat larger effect by inducing students to conform to the be-
havior of appropriate role models. To have a still greater impact on
water conservation, we set about to induce a feeling of dissonance by
utilizing the hypocrisy model—in much the same way as we did in
the condom experiment discussed above.
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In the shower experiment, my research assistant intercepted
students on their way to take a shower at the university field house.
As in the condom experiment, we varied both commitment and
mindfulness. In the commitment condition, each student was asked
if she would be willing to sign a poster encouraging people to con-
serve water. The flyer read: “Take shorter showers. If I can do it, so