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A critical review of Stone et al. (1994): Inducing Hypocrisy as a Means of

Encouraging Young Adults to Use Condoms.

Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow and Fried (1994) carried out a study of the
usefulness of hypocrisy in AIDS prevention interventions for young people.
Interventions aimed at promoting condom use to young people in order to
reduce the spread of AIDS had focused predominantly on informing people
of the consequences of AIDS and of their vulnerability to it in the hope of
persuading them that any drawbacks of safe sex would be outweighed by
the benefits (Stone et al., 1994). However, as this approach did not
appear to be persuasive, Stone et al. (1994) investigated how effective
interventions based on dissonance and in particular the hypocrisy
paradigm would be at persuading young people to practice safe sex.
Whilst the experimenters claimed to have found evidence for the effects
of hypocrisy on persuading participants to change their sexual behaviours,
there are a number of theoretical and methodological flaws with the study
that threaten the usefulness of the investigation to AIDS interventions and
hypocrisy and dissonance research. By outlining the study and then
discussing its strengths and its weaknesses it should be made clear that
although the study is imperfect it remains an important study, even if its
findings are less valuable than might be hoped.

This review will first look at the aims of the study, the methods used, the
results found and the conclusions drawn from them, briefly outlining each
section of the research article in turn. The review will then move on to
analyse the flaws of the study in some detail before finally discussing the
positive aspects of the study and reaching a conclusion about its
usefulness to social psychologists.

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As stated above, Stone et al.s study was partially motivated by the failure
of previous interventions to persuade young people to practice safe sex
(Stone et al., 1994): the majority of campaigns had focused on informing
and warning young people about the risks of AIDS, but researchers such
as Fisher and Misovich (1990) had shown that people tend to go into
denial when confronted with threatening information, and that this denial
could prevent people from recognising their vulnerability even when
confronted with clear evidence of it (Snyder, 1978), which indicated that
simply warning young people about their vulnerability would be
ineffective. Cognitive dissonance, i.e. negative arousal produced by
inconsistent cognitions (Festinger, 1962), had already been used
experimentally to motivate a reduction in adolescent smoking (Chassin,
Presson & Sherman, 1990), and the hypocrisy paradigm where publicly
declaring beliefs or values and then reflecting on personal failures to fulfil
them motivates cognitive or behavioural change to eliminate the
inconsistency (Fried, 1998) had been used by Aronson, Fried and Stone
(1991) in a previous study to motivate condom use, with interesting but
insignificant results. Stone et al. (1994) attempted to once again
demonstrate and emphasise the effectiveness of a hypocrisy-based
intervention at motivating safe sex practices by using a behavioural
measure of condom use and follow-up interviews to see if a long-term
effect of hypocrisy-induced dissonance reduction was present.

Seventy-two young people were told that they would be helping the
researchers to develop an education program for high school students
about AIDS and condom use. There were two independent variables in the
study; commitment and mindfulness. In the commitment condition
participants were told to formulate a short persuasive speech on safe sex
(based on provided AIDS information) which was then filmed for use in
schools, and in the no commitment condition participants were asked to
write a speech for the purpose of a memory test. In the subsequent
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mindful condition, participants were asked to write a list of circumstances

in which they had failed to practice safe sex, with participants in the nonmindful condition omitting this stage entirely. Participants were asked
about past condom use and future intentions related to safe sex, and were
given the opportunity to privately purchase condoms and take AIDS
information leaflets ostensibly provided by the Health Centre. Finally,
participants were given short surveys on their past sexual behaviour, were
debriefed and sent home to be interviewed over the phone about their
subsequent sexual activity approximately ninety days later.

The results of the study varied in significance. Participants who went

through both the commitment and mindfulness conditions (i.e.
participants who were manipulated into hypocrisy) were significantly more
likely to purchase condoms than participants from the other groups at a
< .05 and to be concerned with AIDS and safe sex (Stone et al., 1994:
concern was defined as participants buying condoms, taking leaflets, or
both). However, the number of condoms purchased per participant was
not significantly different in the hypocrisy group from the no commitment
and no mindfulness group (the information-only group). Participants who
took part in the commitment condition (i.e. the hypocrisy and
commitment-only groups) had significantly stronger intentions to practice
safe sex in the future than other participants, and female hypocrisy
participants reported significantly greater increases in safe sex intentions
than did male hypocrisy participants, indicating a sex difference in
dissonance reduction. The follow-up interviews, however, found that
hypocrisy participants were not using condoms during sex significantly
more than the other participants (the Mindfulness-Commitment
interaction effect was reported as marginal, being significant at p < .11;
Stone et al., 1994).

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On the basis of their results the experimenters concluded that there was a
significant effect of hypocrisy induction on participants and that it caused
them to change their behaviour to reduce inconsistencies: claiming to
support safe sex and being made aware of past failures to live up to such
claims made participants feel negative arousal and change their
behaviours to feel more self-consistent, and this can be seen in the
condom purchase behavioural measure used (Stone et al., 1994). The
authors of the article also claim that the experiment shows that hypocrisy
techniques are useful in social and educational interventions.

However, there are problems with the study. The experimenters

themselves acknowledge the lack of a significant long-term effect of
hypocrisy: without a demonstrable long-term effect the usefulness of
hypocrisy for interventions is relatively low as interventions typically aim
to bring about lasting benefits (there is also some evidence that
interventions that involve roleplaying such as hypocrisy inductions are
difficult to use in situations where authority figures organise the
intervention, as their involvement can cause suspicion and hostility that
reduces the effect of the intervention (Janis & Gilmore, 1965)). There are
several possibilities regarding the lack of a long-term effect theoretically,
it is possible that cognitive and behavioural changes effected by
dissonance reduction simply do not last for very long after the initial
experiment perhaps because the initial act of purchasing the condoms
was sufficient to reduce dissonance to acceptable levels (Stone &
Fernandez, 2008), because participants find other outlets for dissonance
reduction (Fried & Aronson, 1995), or because the dissonance simply
fades over time and there is no motivation to not revert back to old habits
(Fried & Aronson, 1995). Also, it is difficult to know how participants will
react to hypocrisy, as there is typically more than one way to reduce selfconflict: participants might decide to rate the value of safe sex as less
important instead of changing their behaviour to reflect the value they put
on safe sex, which would not result in any appreciable behavioural effect
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measuring attitudes towards safe sex might be informative in future to

better understand how participants deal with hypocrisy-induced
dissonance.

It is also possible that methodological problems were responsible, as the

debriefing of participants after the experiment but before the follow-up
interviews may have caused them to disregard the changes they decided
upon to escape dissonance arousal, as they could then associate the
dissonance to the psychological manipulation of the study. Alternatively,
the debriefing may have produced demand characteristics in participants
subsequent interviews as they would then be aware of the experiments
purpose depending on the actual content of the debrief and may have
responded in anticipation of what the experimenters were looking to find.
The small sample size of participants interviewed in the final stage of the
experiment only forty-nine responses could be analysed may also be
responsible, as the long-term effects of hypocrisy induction may be subtle
rather than non-existent.

Other methodological issues may have confounded the results of the

study. The method used to measure past condom use and future
intentions of use was imprecise 17cm lines with anchoring statements at
either end were given to participants to mark their responses and
rendered comparison between past use and future intentions difficult, as
the anchors used for each measure were different past use being rated
between not enough and enough and future intentions being rated
between 0% and 100% (Stone et al., 1994). It is difficult to know which
percentages would be considered enough or not enough by
participants: could condom use 80% (or less) of the time be sufficient for
some participants? Attempting to draw conclusions based on the
improvement of future intentions from past actions is, however, not a
major part of the study, so the possible issues with the measures used are
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not as significant as others. For example, the behavioural measure used

i.e. purchasing condoms can also be criticised: having previously
received information on the virtues of safe sex as well as (for participants
not in the information-only group) giving a speech on condom use and/or
reflecting on past failures to use condoms, some participants may have
felt that condom purchase was socially desirable in the circumstances and
that, despite the apparent anonymity and privacy, the experimenters
would know if they had neglected to buy condoms when they came to
refill the receptacle. It is possible then that social desirability was at work
in the behavioural measure as well as the measure of intentions, which
the experimenters did acknowledge as a possibility (Stone et al., 1994).

Despite the criticisms discussed above, the study does have several
meritorious aspects as well. Firstly, the use of a behavioural measure to
observe the effects of the hypocrisy manipulation was a positive step
forward from self-reported and purely attitudinal measures: although
increased condom purchase is not the same thing as increased condom
usage, particularly in the context of the experimental environment, it does
give an indirect indication of behavioural changes related to safe sex
which can provide validity above simply using intention measures (Stone
et al., 1994). A direct measure of condom use is practically impossible
anyway, and so indirect measures must be used. Additionally, the study
did find a large, significant effect of hypocrisy-induced dissonance on safe
sex behaviour which remains an important finding even if its validity can
be questioned if nothing else it is an interesting result that may require
further investigation before being accepted as valid. Stone et al.s (1994)
finding of a significant effect of hypocrisy intervention on behavioural
change is supported by similar findings in other studies (Son Hing, Li &
Zanna, 2001; Fried & Aronson, 1995), suggesting that that result can be
treated as accurate even if the methodology used is open to criticism, and
the possibility of a long-term effect remains open to investigation: larger
samples of participants for follow-up interviews and other measures of
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long-term effects would give the additional sensitivity needed to be

certain of the longevity of hypocrisy interventions influence (Fried &
Aronson, 1995).

Although the study by Stone et al. (1994) fails to prove that hypocrisy
induction is a useful and effective social intervention for use in influencing
behavioural change, it does demonstrate that hypocrisy and the resulting
dissonance can cause significant short-term behavioural changes, and
although this conclusion is uncertain due to the number of methodological
and theoretical criticisms the short-term effect has since been shown in
other studies that support this studys validity. Without a significant longterm effect the study is unable to prove the usefulness of hypocrisy
induction as an intervention, but the study is useful in that it provides
some evidence for the influence of dissonance and its resolution as well as
a basis for further investigation into the field of dissonance and its longterm effects, particularly in social interventions.

2000 words (excluding title)

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