A Hypocritical Oath
By Noah Goldstein, Ph.D.
Although the instruction from the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm applies most directly to medical doctors, most people will agree that harming anything—be it other people, an organization, or the environment—is generally an undesirable outcome. But how can leading others to take a different kind of pledge—a hypocritical oath—divert them from their harmful paths?
Social psychologists Chris Ann Dickerson, Ruth Thibodeau, Elliot Aronson, and Dayna Miller were interested in this very issue. Noting that many people fail to conserve water when showering, the researchers wanted to see whether people could be subtly led to engage in more conservation-oriented behaviors by making them feel hypocritical. To test this idea, they had a research assistant approach female swimmers who were heading toward the women’s locker room to shower. The swimmers were then asked to do one of the following: (1) Fill out a brief survey that reminded them of their lack of water conservation efforts in the past (e.g. “When you take showers, do you ALWAYS make them as short as possible, or do you sometimes linger longer than necessary?”); (2) Write their name on a public flyer that stated, “Please conserve water. Take shorter showers. Turn showers off while soaping up. IF I CAN DO IT, SO CAN YOU!”; or (3) First fill out the survey that reminded them of their lack of water conservation efforts and then write their name on a public flyer encouraging others to conserve water—clearly hypocritical behavior. There was also a control condition, in which the research assistant simply let the swimmers walk toward the showers without stopping them.
Once inside the locker room, a different female research assistant secretly observed the overall time that each participant showered—an inexact but reasonable indicator of water conservation. Using the control condition as a comparison point, the researchers found that neither reminding the swimmers about their past conservation failings nor having them encourage others to conserve alone reduced the time they spent using the water in the shower. However, those who were led to feel hypocritical—by first acknowledging their previous failings to conserver water and then advocating conservation to others—conserved significantly more water. Dickerson and her colleagues suggest that the inconsistency involved in saying one thing and doing another causes unpleasant emotions. These negative feelings drive people to change their behavior to be consistent with what they publicly advocated—even in private.
As these and other studies on this topic make clear, whether it’s a lack of water conservation, environmental protection, voting, or employee honesty with expense accounts, leading others to take a hypocritical oath can be a subtle but powerful way of getting them to practice what they’ve preached.
Source:
Dickerson, C. A., Thibodeau, R., Aronson, E., & Miller, D. (1992). Using cognitive dissonance to encourage water conservation. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 22, 841-854.
Jeff Stone and Nicholas C. Fernandez. (2008) To practice what we preach: The use of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance to motivate behavior change. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2, 1024–1051.
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