Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [66]
“Mindful:” The subjects were asked extreme questions about water conservation (e.g., “Do you always turn off the water while soaping up or shampooing?”) to remind them that they sometimes wasted water.
“Commitment-only:” The subjects were asked to print their names on a flyer that read, “Please conserve water. Take shorter showers. Turn showers off while soaping up. If I can do it, so can you!”
“Hypocrisy:” The subjects received both the mindful and commitment treatments.
In all cases, the university had posted a large sign in the shower room that said, “Take shorter showers. Turn the water off while soaping up.” If the subject said she was going to the showers and agreed to participate in the water-conservation project, Experimenter #1 signaled to another experimenter by casually scratching her knee, whereupon female Experimenter #2, who had been sunbathing by the pool, would go to the showers wearing a waterproof stopwatch to time the swimmer’s shower.
Each of the three treatment groups was more likely to turn off the shower while soaping up than was the control group. The hypocrisy group showers were 27 percent shorter than those in the control group (Dickerson et al. 1992).
In a lab experiment, subjects were given ten one-dollar coins and were asked to decide how the coins should be split with an unknown subject. Control subjects, on average, left $1.84 for the unknown subjects. Members of an experimental group, before being asked how they’d split the coins, were given a task of unscrambling sentences; in doing so, they encountered words such as God, spirit, divine, sacred, and prophet. These “primed subjects” were much more generous; they left an average of $4.22. Similar results were obtained when a separate experimental group encountered non-religious words invoking fairness: civic, jury, court, police, and contract (Shariff and Norenzayan 2007).
You are in a supermarket and see an advertising display for margarine. The display is on a mirror used as a countertop so that you can see yourself. You are offered samples of fat-free and regular margarine. Would the presence of the mirror affect how much you eat of either type of margarine?
3.4.2. Evoke self-awareness
Another way to use guilt to change behavior is to increase people’s self-awareness. This is an indirect way to encourage people think about their standards.
Self-awareness can be evoked in a number of ways, such as giving the impression that others are looking at you, or by looking at yourself in a mirror as you make a decision.
Evidence on evoking self-awareness
Consider the margarine problem mentioned above. The presence of a mirror was expected to get people to think about their internal standards for being healthy. In a field experiment, some shoppers passed a margarine taste-testing table that had a mirror as a countertop, while there was no mirror for other shoppers. The mirror led to a 20 percent reduction in the consumption of the full-fat margarine samples. These results are consistent with mirror studies that date back to the 1970s (Sentyrz and Bushman 1998).
In a lab experiment, subjects were asked to assign tasks to themselves and another subject. One task was interesting; the other was boring. In the first experiment, subjects gave themselves the best task approximately 90 percent of the time. To emphasize standards, in a second experiment, subjects were given a coin and asked to decide who would be assigned the interesting task. This had little effect. Reasoning that the subjects might be misinterpreting the results of the coin flip (“Let’s see, I think it was heads that gave me the good task”), in a third