Being a Hypocrite or Committed While I Am Shopping? A Comparison of the Impact of Two Interventions on Environmentally Friendly Behavior

Abstract

Commitment and the hypocrisy paradigm are two models used to convince people to adopt proenvironmental behaviors. The aim of the present study is to compare the effect of those interventions with a delay between the intervention and the observation of the behavior as this has not been investigated yet. People in a Parisian supermarket were asked to commit themselves by signing a poster advocating the target behavior: no use of plastic bags (commitment condition). Some of them were also asked to remember past transgressions to arouse cognitive dissonance (hypocrisy condition). Attention was paid to whether participants took free plastic bags. Our results showed that participants in the commitment condition were more likely to change their behavior than the participants in the control condition and in the hypocrisy condition. In a final section, implications for the two models are discussed.

Keywords

commitment hypocrisy proenvironmental behavior plastic bags

Introduction

Domestic waste is a serious problem in France as well as in most countries. In September 2003, an official report (Commissariat Général au Plan, 2003) predicted that 75% of French departments would not be able to deal with their domestic waste in 2010. As the official dumps are not sufficient any longer, more and more illegal ones develop. Those illegal dumps are also a serious problem because they contribute to the pollution of natural space and creation of a “waste continent” in oceans. As a consequence of these problems, the government decided to raise public awareness via a national campaign about waste reduction and treatment. One of the solutions was to reduce domestic waste. In 2005, it was decided that free plastic bags frequently used in French supermarkets had to be replaced by reusable bags. According to a French High Broadcasting Council survey (CSA/WWF, 2005), 83% of French people were willing to stop using plastic bags when shopping. However, this was no simple matter. Some major stores feared that they would lose customers (Seghier, 2005) and continued to provide them with free plastic bags.

Psychologists are familiar with this gap between “good attitude” and “good behavior,” especially in the environmental field (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002). The purpose of the present study is to explore the effect of two types of interventions that are used to modify those behaviors: commitment and the hypocrisy paradigm (with cognitive dissonance).

Commitment As a Way to Modify Behaviors

Social psychologists began decades ago to look for the most efficient way to make people change their behaviors in the environmental field. Commitment was first defined by Kiesler in 1971 as “the pledging or binding of an individual to a behavioral act” (Kiesler & Sakumura, 1966). Kiesler considered that individuals were committed by their actions. As soon as they act, they were considered more likely to maintain the behavior they had already adopted once. Kiesler (1971) was the first author to consider commitment as a variable that can be manipulated in or outside the laboratory.

The definition of commitment was later reviewed by Joule and Beauvois (1998/2006) in their approach to free will compliance. They considered freedom of action as the most important commitment factor (Girandola, 2003). They showed that when people committed themselves through nonproblematic action, the attitudes were made stronger and people were more likely to continue with behaviors that were similar to the ones they had just chosen to adopt. Afterwards they could even engage in more costly behaviors compared with the first ones. Committing people by making them act first in the way we want them to behave was then considered an efficient way to make them change their habits on a long-term scale (Girandola & Roussiau, 2003; Roussiau & Girandola, 2002).

Researchers in the commitment field have done a lot of work in environmental fields: for example, public transportation (Bachman & Katzev, 1982; Katzev & Bachman, 1982), energy conservation (Katzev & Johnson, 1983, 1984; Pallak, Cook, & Sullivan, 1980), recycling (Katzev & Pardini, 1987-1988; Pardini & Katzev, 1983-1984; Wang & Katzev, 1990). Their work showed three main interesting results: a written commitment was more effective than an oral one, they observed that a public commitment was more effective than a private one, and, moreover, people who committed themselves individually and not on behalf of a group to which they belonged were more likely to behave in the same line of action.

Cognitive Dissonance and the Hypocrisy Paradigm

Cognitive dissonance was defined by Festinger in 1957 as an aversive state of psychological tension (dissonance) aroused when an individual holds two inconsistent cognitions. Festinger considered that people were motivated to reduce this uncomfortable state by changing one or both of the inconsistent cognitions. Several modes of dissonance reduction exist and the choice of using one over another depends on context.

Some researchers in the field of cognitive dissonance have been interested in behavioral change. Even though many studies have so far focused on attitude change, it has been demonstrated that cognitive dissonance could also be used as a means to make people change their behavior. Aronson, Fried, and Stone (1991) proposed the induced hypocrisy paradigm to make people adopt behavioral change. The procedure classically follows two steps designed to arouse cognitive dissonance due to feelings of hypocrisy. First, participants are freely induced to advocate the importance of a current attitude they already have. This attitude usually concerns a prosocial behavior, high in social desirability and with positive consequences for others. This is the “commitment step” as it is intended to commit people to their initial attitude to make it stronger. Generally, these behaviors are made public so that the normative dimension of the behavior appears even more salient (Fointiat, 2008). The second step of the hypocrisy paradigm procedure is a “mindfulness step.” Participants are asked to recall past instances in which they failed to act in accordance with what they advocated previously. Those two steps make people aware of their own inconsistencies to the extent of changing their behavior to reduce dissonance.

In the first experiment, researchers wanted to convince students to systematically use condoms (Aronson et al., 1991). Dickerson, Thibodeau, Aronson, and Miller (1992) applied this paradigm to an environmental issue. They tried to make participants conserve water in Florida. Participants were recruited at a swimming pool. They were first asked to sign a flyer promoting water conservation (commitment step) and then asked to fill in a questionnaire referring to plausible past transgressions (mindfulness step). The results showed that the participants made hypocritical with this procedure (the two steps) were more likely to conserve water afterward as they took shorter showers than participants in the control group.

Since the 1990s, much research has been conducted using the hypocrisy paradigm, and this paradigm has been tested in various domains. For instance, it has been used to promote healthy behavior (e.g., Priolo & Liégeois, 2008; Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow, & Fried, 1994) and road safety (e.g., Fointiat, 2004; Fointiat, Grosbras, Michel, & Somat, 2001; Fointiat, Morisot, & Pakuszewski, 2008), and to fight racism (e.g., Son Hing, Li, & Zanna, 2002). When the effect of commitment is compared with the effect of the hypocrisy paradigm, results showed that participants in the hypocrisy condition were more likely to change their behavior than those in the committed-only condition (Fointiat, 2004). However, to the best of our knowledge, only one was conducted in the environmental field (Dickerson et al., 1992).

The Impact of Delay

The studies previously presented explored the impact of the two paradigms where the opportunity to achieve the target behavior directly followed the intervention. Many studies have explored the impact of cognitive dissonance and commitment showing that the two paradigms are effective in changing people’s behavior when there is no delay between the manipulation and the target behavior. The hypocrisy paradigm has even shown better results compared with a commitment-only procedure in a couple of studies (Dickerson et al., 1992; Fointiat, 2004). However, in everyday life, people can most of the time experience dissonance without being able to reduce it immediately by performing the “good” behavior. The delay concerning its reduction might then permit other modes of reduction to emerge, decreasing the influence on behavior. The absence of delay in experiments is artificial compared with what happens in real life.

When considering cognitive dissonance theory, we know that delay can affect the way the participants choose the mode of dissonance reduction (Leippe & Eisenstadt, 1994). More precisely, it can make people justify their behavior defensively to reduce dissonance, preventing an attitude change (Denizeau, Gosling, & Oberlé, 2009) or behavioral change (Beauvois, Joule, & Brunetti, 1993). Therefore, delay can lead people to justify their behavior instead of changing it and could lead to a defensive reaction, which would hinder the effect of commitment. In the hypocrisy paradigm, as in cognitive dissonance, holding two inconsistent cognitions creates an aversive state of psychological tension, which the individual is motivated to reduce by any means, and if necessary in the opposite way of the commitment taken and therefore different from the desired behavior change. Such an effect has been shown in the hypocrisy paradigm with the use of defensive reduction modes, such as trivialization and justification of past transgressions (Martinie & Fointiat, 2010).

By contrast, when people commit themselves, no motivation to use defensive reactions exists as there is no inconsistency in commitment. Therefore, delay does not have any impact on the effectiveness of commitment (Joule, Bernard, & Halimi-Falkowicz, 2008; Joule, Girandola, & Bernard, 2007; Katzev & Wang, 1994). Therefore, it seems necessary to explore the effect of the hypocrisy paradigm compared with the effect of commitment on its own where there is a delay present.

Research Objectives

Our objective was to compare the effect of commitment and the hypocrisy paradigm when used to favor proenvironmental behaviors within a real-world context. More precisely, we aimed to improve on previous research by (a) using a realistic field setting with many individuals present, (b) measuring actual behavior instead of just behavioral intentions, and (c) measuring the behavior after a delay.

Hypotheses

In contrast to previous work, we expected differing effects of commitment and hypocrisy interventions in this context containing delay.

Because the delay between the intervention and the behavioral measure would allow dissonance reduction via defensive justifications, we predicted that participants in the commitment-only condition (who were not experiencing dissonance) would show more attitude-consistent behaviors than the participants in the hypocrisy condition (who were experiencing dissonance) and in the control group.

Method

Participants and Field Setting

The study was conducted in a Parisian supermarket on Saturdays as they are busy shopping days and because the population was more representative. The supermarket, however, was not crowded. It was chosen because customers were being given two choices, either to take free plastic bags from the supermarket or to buy reusable bags. Before this experiment, no reusable bag had ever been sold in this supermarket.

Seventy-four customers of all ages (43 women and 31 men) were approached individually as they entered the supermarket to let a large amount of time (10-30 min) elapse between our intervention and the measure of participants’ target behavior. Every customer entering the supermarket was approached. We made sure that they intended to use plastic bags to bring their shopping back home on that particular day. People who had their own reusable bags were not approached or included in the study. Finally, we made sure that they did not have too few items to buy and that they will need at least one plastic bag. Participants were not paid for their participation. No customer refused to listen to us. They were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental conditions (24 in the commitment condition and 25 participants in the hypocrisy condition). In addition to those two experimental conditions, 25 customers (12 women and 13 men) constituted the control group. They were chosen with the same criteria. This control group allowed us to evaluate the choice of customers when there was no intervention. We observed them the week before the experimental data was collected. It was also on a Saturday afternoon and we took note of whether they took plastic bags after shopping.

Design, Materials, and Experimental Procedure

There were three phases in the procedure.

Phase 1: Recruitment

We stood at the entrance in front of a presentation stand so that the reusable bags were visible. This was set as a clear reminder for the need to protect the environment by using fewer plastic bags. We approached every customer entering the supermarket.

Phase 2: Experimentation

The participants were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental conditions: commitment or hypocrisy.

In the commitment condition, participants were asked to sign a poster advocating the proenvironmental target behavior just as the participants in Dickerson et al.’s experiment (1992) did. The sign represented the Earth in a plastic bag and read as follows: “The Earth can’t breathe, stop using plastic bags. IF I CAN DO IT, SO CAN YOU.” The experimenter explained that the poster was designed for further distribution in Parisian supermarkets and was intended to encourage other customers to give up plastic bags. Participants who agreed with the message were asked to write down their first name, last name and sign the document. This commitment was therefore public and personal. No participant refused to do it.

In the hypocrisy condition (commitment and salience of past transgressions), participants signed the poster and then answered two questions concerning their habits in terms of plastic bag use (past transgressions). We used a 10 point-scale (0 standing for “never” and 9 for “always”). The statements were as follows: “I use shopping bags or reusable bags to bring my shopping back home” and “I use free plastic bags that I take in the supermarket to bring my shopping back home.” To screen out those who did not need bags, we made sure that participants never answered “always” to the first question and “never” to the second one. No one did. To assure that some dissonance was aroused, these measures were summarized: “I use reusable bags” yielded a mean of 3.48 (SD = 2.77) and “I use free plastic bags” yielded a mean of 7.84 (SD = 1.52). These measures confirmed that participants’ past behaviors were transgressions as they did not use reusable bags often and frequently used plastic bags.

Afterward, all participants received a colored card they had to give back after shopping. The color enabled us to notice the experimental condition (there were two different colors). We had in our hands a pack of cards with different colors (more than two) so that participants thought that we took their cards randomly. We told them that it was meant to count the number of people approached that day and that they would give it back to our colleagues after shopping.

After those interventions, customers went on shopping. Then, they went to the cash desk where they had the opportunity to take plastic bags or to buy reusable bags. Because we were observing real behaviors dissociated from the experimental intervention (Dickerson et al., 1992), it was impossible to have a control group without delay: The observed behavior (take free plastic bags or not) would have been observed in front of the participants who would have been aware of the experimenters’ presence. Therefore, the behaviors would have been modified and we would not have been able to compare the two control conditions with and without delay.

Phase 3: Observation

Observers were standing at the exit of the supermarket, behind the cash desks so that customers did not have to give the card back directly to the cashier, which could have reinforced social desirability as it corresponded to the moment when they had to choose whether to take plastic bags. There was a table in front of the observers with a jar where participants inserted their colored cards. The observers discreetly wrote down the color of the card and the participants’ behaviors on an observation grid: whether they took plastic bags or not. Observers did not know the correspondence between conditions and the colors of the cards.

Results

We recorded whether participants took free plastic bags. To investigate whether the frequencies of participants in the three conditions differed, a chi-square statistic was used. Table 1 shows the proportions of participants who did not take free plastic bags in the different conditions.

Table 1.

Percentages of People Who Did Not Take Plastic Bags According to Conditions.

Condition	n	Participants who did not take free plastic bags (%)
Control	25	0
Commitment	24	29
Hypocrisy	25	4

As expected, there was a significant difference between the commitment condition and the control condition. Participants were more likely to give up free plastic bags in the commitment condition (29%) than in the control condition (0%), χ²cor (1, 49) = 6.29, p < .02, φ = .10.

Moreover, there was no difference between the hypocrisy condition (4 %) and the control condition (0%), χ²cor (1, 50) = 0.00, ns. Participants in the hypocrisy condition were not more likely to give up plastic bags than those in the control condition.

The hypocrisy condition (4%) was significantly different from the commitment condition (25%), χ² (1, 49) = 3.98, p < .05, φ = .11. Participants who did not take plastic bags in the hypocrisy condition were fewer than those in the commitment condition.

Discussion

Implications for the Commitment Theory

Prior research showed that commitment can be an efficient method to use when one is willing to induce others to change behavior. Those results were confirmed by our study. Participants who committed themselves by signing a poster advocating the proenvironmental target behavior were more likely to change their behavior than the participants in the control group. We observed they were less likely to take free plastic bags. Moreover, our results showed that the commitment effects were strong even after a delay: Participants committed themselves at the beginning of their shopping whereas the opportunity to adopt the proenvironmental target behavior occurred at the end of their shopping. Our hypothesis concerning the commitment effects was therefore confirmed, showing that it is able to reduce by more than one fourth the rate of plastic bag consumption.

Implications for the Hypocrisy Paradigm

The results we observed with the hypocrisy paradigm also confirmed our hypotheses. Participants in this condition did not adopt proenvironmental behavior compared with those in the control condition. There were as many participants who took free plastic bags in this condition as in the control group. This result would be consistent with the idea that participants reduced any dissonance during the delay with cognitive or emotional means, thus reducing the need to reduce dissonance by changing behavior.

Behavioral change has generally been considered the easiest way to reduce cognitive dissonance aroused in the hypocrisy paradigm (Stone, Wiegand, Cooper, & Aronson, 1997), though some research (Martinie & Fointiat, 2010) has shown that this is not always the case. Behavioral change to reduce cognitive dissonance is not likely after a delay. Participants can resort to trivialization and react defensively to cognitive dissonance (Gosling, Denizeau, & Oberlé, 2006), even more so when they are made to feel hypocritical after the intervention. We suspect that the participants did feel cognitive dissonance, which was reduced by trivialization or cognitive rationalization (Beauvois et al., 1993; Beauvois & Joule, 1999). This interpretation of our results seems relevant given that participants were approached at the beginning of their shopping. As a result, once cognitive dissonance had been aroused, they kept going with their shopping and had time to trivialize or rationalize their behavior. We were able to informally observe some examples of those reactions when participants asked us how they could not use plastic bags when they had to bring their shopping back home. When we told them that they could buy reusable bags, some of them reacted by saying that they needed plastic bags as they used them as rubbish bins at home. They also said that they did not want to pay for it as it would give money to the supermarket and that it was not their role to pay for the environment. It was clear that participants already had an opinion on plastic bags and the fact that they were to disappear and this created a negative feeling about their own behavior certainly making those arguments more accessible in memory. Such arguments may have been mobilized by the participants as they were doing their shopping. Such mobilization may have made the behavioral change unnecessary when they arrived in front of the cashier. Liégeois, Yserbyt, and Corneille (2005) or Lopez, Lassarre, and Rateau (2010) have also shown that the hypocrisy paradigm can backfire, in the environmental field in particular. This hypothesis will have to be explored in a future experiment with a systematic measure of different modes of dissonance reduction. It would be interesting to test whether the participants in the hypocrisy condition rationalize or trivialize their behavior to reduce dissonance by formally asking them to explain what they thought or felt within the delay following the moment when they were made to feel hypocritical.

On one hand, our study confirmed the impact of commitment on environmental behavior change. Moreover, those effects seemed to last in time as the impact of commitment was measured several minutes after the intervention. On the other hand, we showed that the hypocrisy paradigm did not induce people to adopt that behavior. On the basis of the existing literature (Beauvois et al., 1993; Leippe & Eisenstadt, 1994)—which showed that people could reduce dissonance using one mode of reduction instead of another depending on the timing context—we assumed that the effects of this paradigm were sensitive to the delay that exists between the intervention and the moment when the behavior was observed. This result has to be confirmed by further research with a larger sample size and a real-world setting that allows for a no-delay control condition. We can also assume that our results might have differed with different strengths of inducing dissonance and it would be interesting to test this by asking participants to remember more than two past transgressions. One would have to be careful to induce a high level of dissonance in the field without inducing demand characteristics. Moreover, we could also pay more attention to the exact or average time that shoppers spent in the store.

To conclude, our study would suggest the importance of taking into account the fact that many campaigns are launched long before people have to make a choice about changing their behavior. One way of increasing the effectiveness of the interventions would be to act on the individuals immediately after them (by measuring behavioral intentions for instance). Thus, behavioral change may well be observed even after a delay.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Lolita Rubens had pursued a doctoral degree in applied psychology. Her research interests concern behavioral changes in the environmental field, and especially inducing it with cognitive dissonance (hypocrisy paradigm) and commitment theories (binding communication in particular).

Patrick Gosling is professor of social psychology at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and director of the Parisian Laboratory of Social Psychology. His main research fields concern cognitive dissonance, judgments of responsibility, causal attribution, vocational psychology, and social judgment.

Marino Bonaiuto is full professor of social psychology in Italy. He teaches at the Faculty of Medicine and Psychology at Sapienza University of Rome, where he is president of a master’s degree in psychology of communication and marketing and also a member of the board of the PhD in social psychology at the Department of Psychology of Socialization and Development Processes and vice-president of Interuniversity Centre for Research in Environmental Psychology (CIRPA). His main expertise in environmental psychology is in research and consultancy especially in the fields of residential environments, particularly neighborhood, health care environments, green and natural areas, working environments, and verbal and bodily communication.

Xavier Brisbois is working at applying psychology to the field of collective behaviors after his degree in social psychology at Grenoble University,

Annie Moch is an emeritus professor in the psychology department at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. Her main research concern in the environmental psychology field is about cognitive processes as well as behaviors that mediate the potential control of the environment.

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