Inducing Hypocrisy as a Means of Encouraging Young Adults to Use Condoms

Abstract

This experiment applied a new twist on cognitive dissonance theory to the problem of AIDS prevention among sexually active young adults. Dissonance was created after a proattitudinal advocacy by inducing hypocrisy-having subjects publicly advocate the importance of safe sex and then systematically making the subjects mindful of their own past failures to use condoms. It was predicted that the induction of hypocrisy would motivate subjects to reduce dissonance by purchasing condoms at the completion of the experiment. The results showed that more subjects in the hypocrisy condition bought condoms and also bought more condoms, on average, than subjects in the control conditions. The implications of the hypocrisy procedure for AIDS prevention programs and for current views of dissonance theory are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 331 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.