Dr. Tajuddeen A. Williams

Hypocrisy and Behavior Change

· Personal Essays

While growing up, I was often told by my elders to “practice what you preach”. The basis of this saying is if you are going to proclaim something openly, make sure your actions are in line with what you are saying. The basis of the hypocrisy paradigm holds the same premise. It takes previously held beliefs in order to facilitate behavior change by making them mindful of past inconsistent behavior. Therefore, when a person freely chooses to promote a behavior that they do not practice themselves, it creates dissonance (O'Leary, n.d.). This dissonance can be used to bridge the gap between knowing what one should do and actually doing it. Induced compliance paradigm differs from the hypocrisy paradigm due to its requirement that a person engage in behavior that is inconsistent with their beliefs (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). As an example, I may not like a particular co-worker, but I agree to give them a letter of recommendation. Researchers predict that hypocrisy works because cognitive consistency is a principle of how we function (Pychyl, 2012). Whenever we experience dissonance, we are uncomfortable and we seek to relieve that feeling of tension we experience from it.

In 1994, Stone and colleagues set out to encourage young adults to use condoms by way of the hypocrisy paradigm. They brought in willing participants, which were college students between the age of 18 and 25, to deliver a persuasive message on video camera about AIDS. The purpose was to create a feeling of hypocrisy by promoting a behavior that is consistent with their beliefs, but inconsistent with their behavior. The subjects who recorded a video were part of the commitment group, which was broken down to hypocrisy and commitment-only groups. They were told that they were creating a video about safe sex for high school students. The non-commitment group wrote a persuasive speech about the same issue, but they did not record a video message. Instead of being told they were led to believe that they were doing a study on memory and persuasive writing (Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow, & Fried, 1994). This group was divided into mindful-only and information-only groups. Behavior changes were measured by the purchasing of condoms. The data supported the hypothesis that student participants were more likely to buy condoms after the completion of the session. The hypocrisy group subjects purchased more condoms on average than the other three groups.

The research assumes that the students who purchased the condoms from the hypocrisy group experienced dissonance as a result of the experiment and sought to change their behavior. I do not believe that this study accounted for students who could not afford condoms or those who are too shy to purchase them openly in front of others. This also could have been a matter of convenience. It was convenient to purchase the condoms right on the spot with money they had just received as opposed to going to the health center or a drug store. One of the last things that people think of is stopping what they are doing and going out to get condoms. There was also no way to verify the results of the study without actually getting in bed with the students when they were about to have sex or even if the condoms purchased were used. Likewise, there was no way to verify any of the information the students shared about their condom use or sex life and it had to be accepted for face value. In any of these situations, the data would be skewed and it may not be the case that hypocrisy encouraged condom use. I believe one way to increase the usage of condoms among college students would be to make them accessible at the dorms by way of vending machines and make them as affordable as the ones available at the health center. I hypothesize that the sale of condoms would increase significantly over those sold at the health center.

In order to use hypocrisy as a way to motivate people to use sunscreen more often when they’re in the sun, I could link sunscreen usage and skin cancer. My target audience would be beach goers who do not use sunscreen regularly but they believe they should. I would get them to make a public commitment by recording a short public service announcement targeted to spring breakers about the importance of using sunscreen. Many people know that if you are going to be in the sun, you should use sunscreen. As a result, quite a few may remember what happens when they did not take the precaution to protect their skin by way of sunburn and skin peeling. These examples could be reminders of past failures of what happens when you do not use sunscreen. Much like the condom study, sunscreen could be made available for sale after the recording of the public commitment. The way that I could measure the effectiveness of induced hypocrisy would be in the number of sales versus the sales of those who did not make a public commitment.

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