Let’s finish by talking about an example
of how dissonance theory can be used to bring
about behaviour change in a positive way.
One of the common targets for government funded
advertising campaigns is to try and get people
to behave in a more prosocial manner.
For example, trying to get people to use sunscreen,
drive more safely, or use less water.
Previously we talked about ways in which persuasive
messages can help influence attitudes, and
perhaps behaviour, but the effect is sometimes
tenuous.
Dissonance theory suggests that people’s
own behaviour could influence their attitudes,
and because the persuasion is coming from
within, rather than from an external communicator,
it should at least in theory be more influential.
The problem is that using the method that
we described in the Festinger and Carlsmith
(1959) study, which is called Induced Compliance,
we would have to get participants to act in
counter-attitudinal ways to change their behaviour.
As most people already have relatively positive
attitudes towards being healthy, using less
water and so on, this would mean getting them
to behave in the opposite way, which would
be completely counter-productive!
Dickerson and his colleagues suggested in
this paper from 1992, that feelings of hypocrisy
could be used to motivate behaviour change
that’s consistent with prosocial attitudes.
Their approach was based on Elliot Aronson’s
revision to dissonance theory called the “self-concept
approach”.
The basic idea is that people generally have
a positive self-concept, and feeling like
you are a hypocrite is inconsistent with a
positive self-concept.
Hypocrisy is the feeling that your behaviours
are different from your attitudes––you
don’t do what you say people should do.
Aronson thought that when the positive self-concept
is threatened, we will be motivated to restore
a positive self-concept in some way.
So, let’s look at Dickerson and colleagues’
1992 study.
They were interested in how to get people
to behave in ways that saved water.
The study was done in California, which at
the time was experiencing a severe drought.
The researchers went to the public swimming
pool, and as people got out of the pool, a
researcher approached some of them to ask
about their past water conservation behaviour
by getting the swimmer to complete a checklist.
Now, this checklist was biased in such a way
that it was difficult to answer yes to many
of the questions, even though the behaviours
listed on the checklist were all sensible
water saving behaviours.
The questions from the checklist asked things
like…
Did your shower take 4 minutes or less this
morning?
Did you turn off the tap while shampooing
your hair?
Did you turn off the tap while using the soap?
Did you catch the shower water with a bucket
and use it on your garden?
Did you turn off the tap while brushing your
teeth?
Some of the other participants were not reminded
of their past behaviour that related to using
water.
Half of the participants were asked to make
a public commitment to their attitude about
saving water by signing a petition advocating
for people to take shorter showers and save
water.
They were told that this petition would be
displayed around the neighbourhood so that
everybody could see that this person thought
that saving water was a great idea.
The other half were not asked to sign the
petition, so they did not make a public commitment
to their attitude.
The researcher then let the swimmers go back
to take a shower.
A second researcher was hiding in the shower
block however, and had a stopwatch to time
how long the swimmers spent in the shower,
and also wrote down whether the swimmers turned
the taps off while shampooing their hair and
so on.
So, who do you think took the shortest showers?
Let’s take a look at the results.
On the x-axis we have the two conditions where
participants had either been asked to make
a public commitment to their attitude by signing
the petition, or had not been asked to commit
to their attitude.
On the y-axis we have how long the shower
was on for in seconds.
The blue shows the group of swimmers who had
been reminded of their past wasteful behaviour
via the biased checklist, while the green
are those who had not been reminded of their
past behaviour.
So, the greatest hypocrisy should be when
swimmers make a public commitment to their
attitude and are reminded of their past wasteful
behaviours.
These people should be the most motivated
to change their behaviour to repair their
self-concept.
And we can see that it is precisely these
people who took the shortest showers.
So, dissonance theory can also be used to
change people’s behaviour to be more prosocial.
In fact, dissonance theory has turned out
to be an incredibly useful theory.
It has been used in research on decision making,
colour preferences, the socialisation of children,
and cures for snake phobias.
It has also been used to study interpersonal
attraction, religious proselytising, gambling
behaviour, water conservation and safer sex
practices.
It forms the basis of clinical interventions
such as motivational interviewing.
One of the things that makes dissonance such
a powerful motivator of attitude change is
that the persuasion comes from within us.
