(60-2) Stone2008

Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2/2 (2008): 1024–1051, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00088.
To Practice What We Preach: The Use of

Hypocrisy and Cognitive Dissonance to
Motivate Behavior Change
Jeff Stone* and Nicholas C. Fernandez
University of Arizona
Abstract
When people fail to practice what they preach, their act of hypocrisy can induce
cognitive dissonance and the motivation to change their behavior. The current
paper examines the evidence for this assumption by reviewing and analyzing
the research that has used the hypocrisy procedure to influence the performance
of pro-social behaviors related to health, the environment, and interpersonal
relations. The first section looks at the evidence for the claim that hypocrisy
motivates behavior change as opposed to other forms of dissonance reduction
such as attitude change. We then review studies that suggest that the induction
of hypocrisy exerts its greatest effect on behavior change when people publicly
advocate the importance of the target course of action and are then privately
reminded of their own recent personal failures to perform the target behavior. A third
section discusses the limitations to the current body of work and important
directions for future research. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of
how the hypocrisy procedure relates to other contemporary models of behavior
change.
People often say one thing but do another without ever realizing the
discrepancy inherent in their actions. Perhaps this is not surprising; after
all, nobody likes a hypocrite. Nevertheless, when people do make the
connection between how they believe they should behave, and their failure
to behave as they should, their dilemma can present them with an oppor-
tunity for change. The purpose of this paper is to examine the processes
by which an act of hypocrisy can motivate people to bring their behavior
back into line with their pro-social beliefs.
Leon Festinger first described the psychological causes and con-
sequences of inconsistencies between behavior and belief 50 years ago in
his seminal book, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957). According to
Festinger (1957), the perception of an inconsistency between behavior and
belief induces a negative state of tension that is similar to how people feel
when they are hungry or thirsty. The tension or discomfort subsequently
© 2008 The Authors
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Using Hypocrisy to Change Behavior 1025
motivates them to reduce it by restoring consistency among the relevant

cognitions. Festinger believed that the psychological processes by which
people restore consistency could lead to enduring and meaningful changes
in the way they act and view their social world.
This paper celebrates the 50th anniversary of the theory of cognitive
dissonance by highlighting its usefulness for understanding and promoting
behavior change through the induction of hypocrisy (Aronson, Fried, &
Stone, 1991; Aronson, 1999). In the hypocrisy paradigm, people are made
aware of a pre-existing inconsistency between their beliefs and behavior
while completing two carefully constructed tasks. First, they are asked to
make a public advocacy about the importance of a pro-social target
behavior. For example, people can deliver a brief speech or write an essay
designed to convince others of the importance of a behavior that they
believe will benefit the health and welfare of specific individuals or society
in general. Their advocacy is designed to be consistent with their current
attitudes and beliefs about the target behavior and, as a result, does not
cause dissonance. The dissonance and the need to restore consistency are
induced by subsequently making people aware of the fact that they them-
selves have failed to practice the target behavior in the past. Mindfulness
for past failures is accomplished by having people examine or generate a
list of their reasons for not performing the behavior when they had the
opportunity. Once they are made mindful of the inconsistency between
their beliefs about the behavior, and their past failures to perform the
behavior, people feel the discomfort associated with cognitive dissonance,
which they become motivated to reduce.
A key element of the hypocrisy procedure is that the dissonance motiv-
ates people to change their behavior. The vast majority of dissonance
studies, beginning with Festinger and Carlsmith (1959), show that when
behavior is inconsistent with attitudes and beliefs, people can reduce
dissonance by changing their attitudes to be consistent with the discrepant
behavior (Cooper & Fazio, 1984). In other words, they justify the discrepant
act in order to reduce their discomfort and the perception that they did
anything wrong (Tavris & Aronson, 2007). In contrast, a hypocritical
discrepancy motivates people to literally ‘practice what they preach’; an
act of hypocrisy motivates people to take the steps that are necessary to
make their behavior consistent with the behavioral standards that they
advocate to others. Thus, an act of hypocrisy arouses a form of dissonance
that pushes people to take action.
In his original theory, Festinger (1957) observed that people might
prefer behavior change to attitude change as the means to reduce dis-
sonance. In speculating about the various ways in which dissonance could
be reduced, Festinger proposed that the simplest way to reduce dissonance
is to change behavior: ‘Our behavior and feelings are frequently modified
in accordance with new information. . . . There are persons who do stop
smoking if and when they discover it is bad for their health’ (p. 20).
© 2008 The Authors Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2/2 (2008): 1024–1051, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00088.x
1026 Using Hypocrisy to Change Behavior
Nevertheless, Festinger also observed that behavior change may not

always be feasible; a number of factors could make a behavioral cognition
resistant to change, and when this is the case, people need to change
other less resistant cognitions like their attitudes or beliefs to reduce
dissonance. Whereas this observation led to many of the counter-intuitive
predictions that became the hallmark of the dissonance literature, it
also diminished interest in behavior change as a strategy for dissonance
reduction.
There are two factors that make behavior change the primary strategy
for dissonance reduction following hypocrisy. First, when people advocate
a pro-social course of action to others, if they use proscribed, well-
accepted normative standards for promoting the target behavior, these
cognitions can be difficult to distort or change. According to Festinger
(1957), a crucial determinant of dissonance reduction is the relationship
between the relevant inconsistent cognitions and their connection to
perceptions of ‘reality’. Specifically, Festinger (1957) suggested that the
‘reality which impinges on a person will exert pressures in the direction
of bringing the appropriate cognitive elements into correspondence with
that reality’ (p. 11). People often rely on their perception of the normative
standards to define reality and to maintain their relationships with import-
ant others. Altering their perceptions of the norms for behavior to reduce
a hypocritical discrepancy may not only imperil important relationships,
but by contradicting well-proscribed norms, such changes may also create
new inconsistencies that arouse more dissonance. Thus, attitudes and
beliefs that are associated with the normative standards for appropriate
conduct can be more resistant to change than future behavior. Indeed,
changing future behavior following an act of hypocrisy brings oneself into
line with the perceptions of reality that most people share in common
with important others.
Second, when made mindful of how one is not upholding the
advocated norms for behavior, the discrepancy activates highly important
cognitions linked to perceptions of self-integrity. According to the self-
consistency revision of dissonance theory (Aronson, 1968, 1999), people
perceive an act of hypocrisy as a threat to their perception of self-integrity,
which stems from their core self-beliefs about honesty and sincerity
(Stone, Wiegand, Cooper, & Aronson, 1997). Following a hypocritical
act, maintaining or restoring these perceptions of self-integrity requires
that people act in a more honest and sincere manner than in the past.
Thus, when they behave like a hypocrite, people become motivated to be
honest and sincere about the norms for behavior, which is most directly
accomplished by bringing their behavior into line with the proposed
course for action.
The goal of this review is to examine the available research support for
the assumption that an act of hypocrisy motivates people to change their
behavior. In doing so, we first examine the evidence indicating that
hypocrisy motivates behavior change as opposed to other forms of dissonance

reduction such as changing attitudes or intentions to act. We then review
the studies that have mapped out parameters to the hypocrisy effect by
manipulating factors associated with the public advocacy of behavioral
standards and mindfulness of past failures to uphold the standards. In the
final section, we discuss limitations to the current body of work and the
directions these issues point to for future research on the stages people go
through to change their behavior.
Testing the Effect of Hypocrisy on Behavior Change

The first test of the prediction that people want to change their behavior
following an act of hypocrisy attempted to motivate sexually active college
students to adopt the use of condoms to prevent AIDS (Aronson et al.,
1991; Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow, & Fried, 1994). In the first experi-
ment (Aronson et al., 1991), sexually active male and female college
students were recruited to help develop an AIDS prevention and educa-
tion program to be used with high school students. In order to manipulate
their ‘mindfulness’ for past failures to practice safe sex, half the participants
were asked to think about past failures to use a condom and then describe
the circumstances that led them to have unprotected sex (e.g., they forgot
to acquire condoms). The other half of the participants did not generate
a list of past failures to use condoms; they went directly to the public
advocacy manipulation.
Participants randomly assigned to the ‘speech’ condition were told
that the main purpose of the AIDS prevention program was to create a
persuasive video that could impact the sexual behavior of high school
students. However, it was critical to first determine if college students
would be the most influential speaker for a high school audience. To test
this idea, the researchers was asking college students to videotape messages
about safe sex so they could be compared against similar messages made
by an older ‘expert’. Participants were then asked if they would be willing
to make a short videotaped speech about the importance of practicing
safer sex through condom use (most agreed). They were supplied with a
‘menu of facts’ about AIDS and AIDS prevention that they could use to
create their speech. Participants were given approximately 5 minutes to
create the speech, after which they were seated in front of a video camera,
and told not to worry about mistakes during the presentation because the
video would only use the best parts of their presentation. Participants then
completed their speech, and the experimenter always complimented them
on their delivery once it was over.
To control for the speech and the information presented on the speech
fact sheet, the other half of the participants randomly assigned to the ‘no
speech’ condition were told that the researchers were interested in how the
process of developing a speech would impact memory for the information.
Participants were provided the same information and time to think about
how they would use it to deliver a persuasive speech. However, they were
not told about the persuasive videotape and they never delivered a speech
to the camera; no-speech control participants went directly to complete
the dependent measures.
The effectiveness of the hypocrisy procedure was measured via two self-
report responses collected during an interview with the experimenter.
Specifically, participants were asked to indicate how often in the past they
had failed to use condoms during sex and how often in the future they
intended to use condoms when they had sex. The results showed that
following the induction of hypocrisy, participants reported lower past use
of condoms compared with participants who only read information about
AIDS prevention, or who only made the pro-condom speech, or who
were only made mindful of past failures to practice safe sex (Aronson
et al., 1991). However, a ceiling effect was observed on the measure of
future intentions. Thus, whereas hypocrisy subjects showed the greatest
awareness of past failures to practice safe sex, and very high intentions to
alter their future sexual behavior, the data did not show that the induction
of hypocrisy was more effective than the control conditions for improving
future intentions to practice safer sex.
In speculating about the meaning of the behavioral intention data,
Aronson et al. proposed that when exposed to new information about the
dangers of AIDS and the importance of practicing safer sex, as all parti-
cipants were in the initial study, most people realize they should change
their risky behavior. Consequently, when asked about their future behavior,
all proposed that it would change. Nevertheless, not all participants were
motivated to follow through on their intentions; only those in the hypocrisy
condition should be motivated to actually take steps toward practicing
safer sex. Measuring their ‘true’ intentions would require providing
participants with the means to practice safer sex, such as an opportunity
to acquire condoms.
To more directly test the motivation to change behavior, Stone et al.
(1994) conducted a new experiment in which a behavioral measure of
condom acquisition served as the primary dependent measure. The
design of the Stone et al. (1994) experiment was the same as the first
study with a few important changes. First, participants made the pro-
condom speech before being made mindful of past failures to practice
safe sex. Then, after participants completed the same interview questions
collected in the first study, the experimenter announced that the study was
complete. Participants were then provided with the opportunity to acquire
condoms.
The experimenter paid participants four 1-dollar bills and announced
that s/he needed to leave to set up for the next participant. Before exiting,
the experimenter ‘remembered’ that the research was partially funded
through the campus Health Center, and they had supplied condoms that
participants could purchase for 10 cents each. Participants were shown a

large clear plastic container that held 140 condoms and told how they
could make change if they decided to buy some. The experimenter
reminded them to complete their payment receipt, bid them farewell, and
then exited into the next room to wait until the outside door to the lab
opened. The primary dependent measure was the percentage of particip-
ants who removed condoms from the container before leaving.
The results showed that as predicted, 83% of participants in the hypocrisy
condition acquired condoms before leaving the lab, which was signi-
ficantly more than the number of participants who acquired condoms
in the information-only (40%), speech-only (33%), or the mindful-only
control group (50%). Importantly, there was also a main effect for making
the speech on future intentions to use condoms, with those who made
the speech reporting higher intentions than those who did not make the
speech. However, consistent with the hypothesis, participants in the
hypocrisy condition were over two times more likely to follow through
on their high intentions and acquire condoms compared with participants
in the speech-only condition. This difference provided support for the
assumption that hypocrisy participants would go beyond merely stating
their intentions to change; only those in the hypocrisy condition followed
through on their intentions and actually took the steps required to practice
what they preached.
Nevertheless, despite the evidence that more participants had taken
the steps at the end of the experiment to practice safe sex, follow-up
telephone interviews using self-report of condom use since the study
showed that most participants, regardless of condition, reported that they
were using condoms most of the time. Thus, whereas the hypocrisy
procedure appeared to motivate behavior change while participants were
in the carefully controlled laboratory context, the initial studies left open
the question of whether the hypocrisy procedure could motivate behavior
change outside of the experimental setting.
Changing Behaviors Outside of the Lab

Some of the most direct evidence that the hypocrisy procedure can motivate
behavior change outside the lab comes from studies designed to impact
natural resource conservation behavior. For example, a study by Kantola,
Syme, and Campbell (1984) used a procedure similar to hypocrisy as a
means to influence energy conservation behavior. Participants were
homeowners in Australia who held a positive attitude toward the conser-
vation of electricity and agreed to have their consumption of electricity
monitored by the State Energy Commission. After a 2-week baseline
measure of their electricity use, homeowners were randomly assigned to
receive one of four mailings from the energy commission: (i) a letter
stating that they were high consumers of electricity and that they had
previously said that they believed in conservation (dissonance); they also

received an informational pamphlet on energy conservation, (ii) a letter
stating that they were high consumers of electricity plus a conservation
pamphlet, (iii) just the conservation pamphlet, and (iv) a thank you letter.
All participants also received a postage-paid postcard that they could
return to receive more information about energy conservation. The
primary measure of the intervention was the home’s consumption of
electricity over two sequential 2-week periods. As predicted, homes
assigned to the dissonance condition used significantly less electricity
compared with the other three control conditions during both follow-up
periods. Whereas other dependent measures, such as the desire to acquire
more information by returning the postcard, did not show the same effect,
inducing dissonance by making homeowners aware of a discrepancy between
their pro-conservation attitude and past conservation behavior did seem
to motivate them to alter their conservation behavior above and beyond
the other influence strategies. Less clear, however, is whether this reflects the
influence of hypocrisy given that participants did not publicly advocate
the importance of conservation behaviors prior to receiving the letter.
Dickerson, Thibodeau, Aronson, and Miller (1992) conducted a field
experiment designed to use hypocrisy to motivate water conservation. In
this study, a female experimenter approached female swimmers entering
the women’s locker room from a campus recreation pool. After establishing
that participants were in favor of water conservation, half were randomly
assigned to a high mindfulness condition in which they completed a
survey intended to make them aware of past failures to conserve water
(e.g., ‘When you take showers, do you ALWAYS make them as short as
possible, or do you sometimes linger longer than necessary?’). The other
half did not complete a survey. Next, half of each group was asked to
publicly advocate campus conservation efforts by printing their name on
a posted flyer that read: ‘Please conserve water. Take shorter showers. Turn
showers off while soaping up. IF I CAN DO IT, SO CAN YOU!’ The other
half of each group was not exposed to the flyer, they simply entered the
locker room where the primary dependent measure was collected.
To measure their water conservation behavior, a female confederate
who earlier had identified the participant but was blind to condition
waited in the shower room for participants to enter. As they showered,
the confederate unobtrusively recorded two conservation measures: How
long participants allowed the water to run while they showered and the
percentage that turned the shower off while they applied shampoo. As
predicted, the results revealed that participants in the hypocrisy condition
allowed the water to run for significantly less time and were significantly
more likely to turn off the shower while washing their hair, compared
with participants in the no-treatment control condition. One caveat to
this finding, however, was that the combination of the public commit-
ment to water conservation and the reminder of past failures to conserve
water was not more effective for changing behavior than when either
factor was induced alone.
Fointiat et al. (2001, 2004) tested the effects of hypocrisy on motivating
people to become safer drivers. In one study (Fointiat, 2004), experi-
menters approached shoppers outside of a supermarket parking lot and
asked if they would participate in a road safety study. Similar to Dickerson
et al. (1992), all participants first signed a flyer advocating driving the
speed limit. Immediately following their advocacy, participants in the
hypocrisy condition were made mindful of past speeding transgressions by
having them write down times in the last 2 months in which they failed
to obey the speed limit and the reasons for why they sped. The primary
dependent measure was the percentage that then volunteered to have a
tachometer installed in their car that would record their driving behavior.
The results showed that significantly more participants in the hypocrisy
condition volunteered to have their driving monitored (35%) compared
with those in the advocacy-only condition (12%).
These studies suggest that hypocrisy can motivate people to adopt the
target behavior outside of a laboratory context. However, none of the
studies reviewed thus far show direct evidence that dissonance motivation
is the process that mediates the behavioral responses to hypocrisy. Other
mechanisms, like self-perception (Bem, 1972) or attitude accessibility
(Fazio, 1990), could account for many of the findings reviewed above. We
turn next to review other research that has examined more directly the
assumption that a specific form of dissonance arousal and reduction drives
the effect of hypocrisy on behavior.
Examining the Motivational Assumptions about

How Hypocrisy Changes Behavior
The use of hypocrisy to influence behavior assumes that hypocrisy arouses
the negative arousal or discomfort associated with dissonance. To investigate
the presence of dissonance following hypocrisy, Fried and Aronson (1995)
directly manipulated negative arousal by introducing a misattribution cue
during the procedure. Based on previous research showing that when
made salient, people can misattribute dissonance arousal to external
sources (Zanna & Cooper, 1974), the authors reasoned that if the behavior
change that follows hypocrisy is caused by the motivation to reduce the
discomfort associated with dissonance, then if provided another explanation
for their discomfort, participants in the hypocrisy condition should
exhibit less motivation to alter their behavior compared with when no
misattribution cue is present.
Participants in this study were asked to videotape a speech for a pro-
gram designed to encourage recycling behavior. Half were then exposed
to a misattribution cue via a letter from a campus committee requesting
that they report about how the lighting, noise, and temperature in the
newly ‘renovated’ lab space affected them during the study. The other half
were not provided the letter or asked to report their perceptions of the
lab. After all delivered their speech, half of the participants completed a
measure designed to make them mindful of past failures to recycle,
whereas the other half did not complete this task. Those in the misattri-
bution condition completed the misattribution survey, after which it was
announced that the study was complete. The experimenter then informed
participants that the campus recycling center was looking for volunteers
to make telephone calls for them, with the number of participants who
volunteered to make phone calls and the number of calls they volunteered
to make for the recycling center serving as the dependent measures.
The results showed clear support for the dissonance account of the
hypocrisy effect: 68% of participants who made a pro-recycling speech
and then were reminded of past failures to recycle (hypocrisy) volunteered
to make phone calls compared with only 16% of those who made the
pro-recycling speech but were not reminded of past failures. However, the
presence of a misattribution cue significantly reduced the percentage that
volunteered in the hypocrisy condition to only 32%. Like other dis-
sonance paradigms, these data indicate that the hypocrisy procedure induces
a state of negative arousal that people are motivated to reduce. Other
processes, such as attitude accessibility or self-perception, are less parsimonious
with these findings.
Nevertheless, the findings of Fried and Aronson (1995), as well as
research on self-affirmation processes (Steele, 1988), raise an important
question for the hypocrisy effect: If people can avoid changing their
behavior by misattributing their arousal, or by affirming an important but
unrelated aspect of the self, then perhaps a hypocritical discrepancy does
not assure that people will resolve the discrepancy by changing their
behavior. Like counter-attitudinal behavior, an act of hypocrisy may
induce negative arousal that people are motivated to reduce by any means
possible, even if the reduction strategy does nothing to resolve the dis-
crepancy between attitudes and behavior. If this were the case, it would
be difficult to predict when and how people would alter their behavior
following an act of hypocrisy.
Stone et al. (1997) directly tested the self-integrity hypothesis by inducing
hypocrisy about condom use and then simultaneously offering more than
one behavioral option for dissonance reduction. It was predicted that after
an act of hypocrisy, if people have an opportunity to affirm the self by
performing an unrelated positive behavior, they might use that strategy
as a means to reduce their discomfort, even if it does not address the
discrepancy. However, if an act of hypocrisy arouses dissonance because
the behavior threatens self-beliefs about honesty and sincerity, then in
order to restore their self-integrity, participants should be motivated to
change the discrepant behavior. Thus, when provided a choice between
performing the behavior that would reduce the hypocrisy directly and
restore their self-integrity, or performing a behavior that will leave the

discrepancy intact but reduce their discomfort by affirming an unrelated
positive self-attribute, most people would choose to perform the behavior
that most directly reduces the hypocritical discrepancy.
To test this prediction, once they made a pro-condom speech and were
made mindful of past failures to practice safer sex, some participants were
provided with the opportunity to donate to support a homeless shelter – a
behavior that would reduce their dissonance via self-affirmation, but
would not resolve the safer-sex-related hypocritical discrepancy directly.
In the key experimental condition, some participants were offered the
opportunity to donate to the homeless but were then also offered the
opportunity to directly resolve the hypocritical discrepancy by purchasing
condoms. The results supported the self-integrity hypothesis: when
offered only the affirmation option (donation), 83% of those in the
hypocrisy condition used it. However, when the affirmation strategy
was offered alongside the opportunity to restore self-integrity (condom
purchase), 78% chose the direct option, whereas only 13% chose the
affirmation option. Experiment 2 replicated the choice for directly resolving
the hypocritical discrepancy even when the indirect affirmation strategy
held more importance for self-worth than the direct behavioral option.
Together, the results indicate that when the only dissonance reduction
opportunity available to a hypocrite is a behavior that reduces their dis-
comfort but not the discrepancy, they will take advantage of it. After all,
people sometimes do want to feel good about themselves. Nevertheless,
when a behavior is available that directly resolves the hypocrisy, most
people would rather restore their perception of self-integrity by performing
the target behavior (see also Fointiat, 2004).
These lines of research suggest that hypocrisy motivates a specific form
of dissonance arousal and reduction that directs people toward changing
their behavior. Once they advocate the pro-social standards and are then
made mindful of past failures to uphold the standards, the threat to self-
integrity motivates a desire to resolve the discrepancy by bringing the
discrepant behavior into line with the advocated beliefs. Addressing the
problem directly appears to be the preferred mode of dissonance reduction
even when other options for are present.
Mapping the Parameters for Behavior Change

The research indicates that across a variety of topics and settings, the
hypocrisy procedure is an effective strategy for motivating people to prepare
for and perform pro-social behavior. In this section, we examine more
closely the factors that produce these effects. Research examining when
and how hypocrisy motivates behavior change provides insight into the
processes that induce behavioral responses and, at the same time, reveals
important parameters to using the procedure to inspire action.
Advocating normative standards and commitment
In most of the studies, hypocrisy begins when people advocate a pro-

social course of action. The research indicates that the effect of hypocrisy
on behavior change is greatest when participants construct and deliver,
either in writing or in a recording, a persuasive message about the import-
ance of performing the target behavior. Just reading about the importance
of performing the behavior (Aronson et al., 1991; Stone et al., 1994) or
constructing a speech but not recording it on videotape (Stone et al.,
1997) does not engender the same level of dissonance and behavior
change as does the act of delivering the statement to an ‘audience’ in
conjunction with being made mindful of past failures. These findings
indicate that taking a public stand on the importance of a pro-social
behavior is a necessary condition in the hypocrisy effect.
However, there is some question about what mechanism underlies the
effect of public advocacy in these studies. Indeed, evidence regarding
whether hypocrisy exerts greater influence on behavior over and above
just making a public advocacy is somewhat mixed. Whereas some studies
(Stone et al., 1994; Fried & Aronson, 1995) reported significantly greater
effects on behavior when participants publicly advocated the course of
action, other studies did not find a greater effect for hypocrisy over an
advocacy-only control condition (Dickerson et al., 1992; Simmons, Webb,
& Brandon, 2004). A closer look at these divergent findings, as well as
other related work, suggests that the nature of the public advocacy may
play an important role in the effect of hypocrisy on behavior.
The available data suggest the effect of a pro-social public advocacy on
the arousal of dissonance may depend on whether or not participants
make a public commitment to perform the behavior when they advocate
it to others. Interestingly, in studies showing a greater effect for hypocrisy
over the advocacy alone (e.g., Fried & Aronson, 1995; Fried, 1998; Stone
et al., 1994, 1997), the instructions for creating the videotaped or written
statement did not ask the speaker to predict or state that he or she would
perform the behavior in the future. The speakers focused on talking about
why it is important to perform the behavior without holding themselves
up as an example now or in the future. This suggests that advocating the
pro-social behavior without making a personal commitment to it does not,
by itself, motivate people to perform the behavior. As reported above, several
studies show that when people only publicly advocate the importance of a
pro-social behavior, they are significantly less likely than those in the
hypocrisy condition to perform the behavior when offered the opportunity
later, and in some cases, the level of compliance has been less that control
conditions in which people are simply informed about the issue.
Advocating a course of action to others in the absence of a commitment
may inhibit subsequent performance of the behavior through a number of
mechanisms, such as inducing the perception of having established one’s
moral credentials on the topic (Monin & Miller, 2001), or by inducing a

positive illusion about how well one currently upholds the advocated
behavioral standards. Breaking these inhibitory mechanisms may
require that the advocate also be made aware of past failures to uphold
the normative standards. Thus, when people advocate a pro-social course
of action without making a public commitment to perform the behavior
themselves, they may not experience much dissonance unless they are also
made mindful of past failures to perform the behavior themselves.
Nevertheless, other hypocrisy studies (e.g., Dickerson et al., 1992) indicate
that when participants were asked to make a public commitment to the
pro-social course of action, either via prediction or by signing a pledge,
the advocacy alone may increase the motivation to perform the behavior.
One explanation for this effect is that committing oneself to perform the
future behavior, while advocating it to others, automatically makes people
mindful of past inconsistent behavior. For example, research on the self-
prophecy effect (e.g., Spangenberg & Greenwald, 2001) shows that when
people make a prediction regarding their intention to perform or not
perform a pro-social behavior in the future, they are more likely to adopt
the behavior compared with when they predict a different behavior or
simply learn about the behavior. This suggests that a public commitment
to a pro-social course of action, in and of itself, may be sufficient to cause
the dissonance associated with hypocrisy.
Whereas simply having people make a public commitment to the pro-
social course of action may provide a quicker and easier way to induce
hypocrisy and motivate behavior change, it is important to consider
potential limitations to this approach. One is that it assumes that know-
ledge of past and future behavior is chronically linked such that activating
future behavior through commitment will automatically activate a discrep-
ancy with past inconsistent behavior. We know of no line of research that
directly supports this assumption including the work on the self-prophecy
effect (e.g., Spangenberg, Sprott, Grohmann, & Smith, 2003). Given the
potential dispositional and situational limitations to how priming activates
related constructs (see Bargh, 2006), and the evidence that people
sometimes uncouple their current and past self when they reflect back on
negative experiences (Ross & Wilson, 2002, see below), it may be difficult
to predict when the normative standards and past behavior will be
automatically linked in the minds of a given sample. A more effective
approach may be to assume they are not chronically linked and instead
activate the discrepancy directly by making people mindful of past failures
after they predict or commit to the behavior.
Mindfulness: Private but personal and recent

Several studies have identified factors that determine the impact of being
made mindful of past failures on the motivation to perform the target
behavior. For example, Stone et al. (1997) hypothesized that in order for
people to perceive their past behavior as inconsistent with the advocacy,
they must focus on how they personally failed to perform the target
behavior in the past. Focusing on how other people fail to perform the
behavior may not cause dissonance if it leads to the conclusion that most
people fail or that most people do not support the behavior. To test this
prediction, all participants were provided with a list of common reasons
people give for not practicing safer sex. Some participants were asked to
write down the reasons from the list that they personally use when they
personally fail to practice safer sex; the other participants were asked to
indicate the reasons that they have heard others use for why they fail to
practice safer sex. The results revealed that when participants were asked
to recall reasons that other people use for not performing the advocated
behavior, only 52% donated to the homeless when the affirmation strategy
was available, and only 26% purchased condoms when the self-integrity
option was available. In contrast, recalling personal reasons for failing to
practice safer sex caused 78% to purchase condoms after the study was
complete. Thus, hypocrisy caused the greatest motivation to adopt the
target behavior when participants focused on how they personally had
failed to practice the behavior in the past.
Other research suggests that focusing people on the ‘normative appro-
priateness’ of their past failures can moderate the way they resolve their
dissonance following hypocrisy. For example, McKimmie et al. (2003)
showed that when people are led to perceive their past failures as violating
in-group norms, they may reduce their dissonance by changing their
attitudes toward the behavior. In procedures designed to induce hypocrisy
about their generosity toward others, participants were first reminded of
their pro-social attitudes towards generosity and then were asked to recall
times in the past when they had failed to be generous to other people.
All were then shown a graph ostensibly depicting the generosity of 247
college students. Group identity was manipulated by suggesting that
the data were collected from an in-group or an out-group campus. For
participants in a behavioral non-support condition, the graph indicated that
the majority of students reported that they donated money to charities,
paid for the full drink tab when they were with their friends, and reported
giving money to homeless people (87%, 92%, and 82% respectively).
Participants in a behavioral support condition were shown a graph with the
same categories; however, the percentages of peers that had performed
generously were minimal (e.g., 17%, 22%, and 12%, respectively). All then
completed a measure of their attitudes towards generosity (a behavioral
opportunity to act in a generous manner was not provided).
The results showed that participants in the in-group behavioral non-
support condition – those who were told that their past behavior was
inconsistent with their in-group’s behavior – reported significantly less
positive attitudes toward being generous compared with those who were
told that their past failures were consistent with the in-group or out-group
norms for generosity. This suggests that being confronted with information
suggesting that past behavior is deviant from in-group norms can cause
dissonance, but instead of motivating people to adopt the normatively
appropriate behavior, being made mindful of how one is deviant motivates
people to save face by justifying their past failures through attitude change.
Fried (1998) reported a similar finding in two earlier studies that invest-
igated the role of publicly associating people with past failures to perform
the target act. In her research, after participants created a videotape (Study 1)
or wrote a persuasive speech (Study 2) about the importance of recycling,
they were then asked to list past failures to recycle bottles, cans, or news-
papers. To manipulate the level of publicity for past failures, participants
in an anonymous condition completed the list but did not put their name
on it; they were told to place their list in an envelope ostensibly full of
lists completed by other participants. Participants in an identified condition
completed the list but were asked to include their name and phone
number and then sign it in front of the experimenter. Participants in a
control condition worked on a recycling word scramble task for an equal
amount of time. All then completed the behavioral-dependent measures
including the amount of telephone calls they would make for a recycling
center (Study 1) and the amount of money they would donate to a
recycling program (Study 2).
The results showed that hypocrisy participants who felt anonymous
about their recycling failures donated more time to the recycling efforts
in Study 1 and donated more money to the recycling program in Study
2 than participants who were also induced to feel hypocritical about their
recycling habits but were publicly identified with their past failures to
recycle. Moreover, in Study 2, participants were given the opportunity
to report their attitude toward recycling prior to the request to donate
money to recycling programs. The results showed that participants who
were publicly identified with their past failures reported significantly more
negative attitudes towards recycling than participants in the anonymous
failure or control conditions. The publicity of their transgressions apparently
pushed them to justify their past failures by changing their attitudes to be
more negative toward recycling.
Together, the results of the McKimmie et al. (2003) and Fried (1998)
research point to an important consideration in the use of hypocrisy for
behavior change. When publicly associated with past failures to uphold
the standards, or presented with evidence that past failures are deviant,
dissonance is aroused but it may be reduced differently than when people
are allowed to consider their past failures on their own. Publicly confronting
people about past transgressions against the norms may activate other
cognitions in the dissonance ratio that direct people toward others avenues
for dissonance reduction. For example, when identified publicly with
failing to uphold the norms, people may perceive that they are being
humiliated or shamed for their past transgressions, which could cause

anger and self-blame (Stone & Cooper, 2001; seeTangney & Dearing,
2002). Such self-directed thoughts and emotions may focus the hypocrite
on the fear of rejection by others, which may force them to justifying
their past failures. From a dissonance standpoint (Festinger, 1957), if
embarrassment or humiliation over one’s past behaviors makes future
behavior more resistant to change, then people will take the path of least
resistance and change their attitudes about the importance of performing
the behavior. Alternatively, these studies indicate that allowing people to
‘discover’ their past mistakes in private does not force them to back peddle
in order to save face; instead, it motivates them to resolve the discrepancy
by bringing their behavior into line with their advocated beliefs.
Finally, when people consider their past transgressions, if they have
difficulty coming up with past failures to perform the target behavior,
they may conclude that they are not hypocritical about the issue. Son
Hing, Li, and Zanna (2002) provide some evidence for this assumption in
a hypocrisy experiment designed to reduce racial bias among aversive
racists. Son Hing et al. reasoned that because aversive racists subscribe to
egalitarian standards regarding the treatment of out-group members, they
should feel comfortable advocating the egalitarian treatment of others.
However, because they hold implicit negative attitudes, they may not
always behave in an egalitarian way toward out-group members. Truly
low prejudice individuals, in comparison, not only subscribe to the same
egalitarian standards for behavior, but they are more likely to act consist-
ently with their beliefs about the fair treatment of out-group members.
Thus, Son Hing et al. predicted that when made mindful of past failures,
aversive racists would have an easier time recalling past failures to be
fair compared with low prejudice individuals and thus would feel more
hypocritical and be more motivated to perform an egalitarian act if
provided an opportunity.
For the study, aversive racists were identified in a first session as indi-
viduals who reported low prejudice towards Asian Canadians on an
explicit measure but revealed a racial bias towards Asian Canadians on an
implicit measure. During an unrelated second session, all participants
wrote a persuasive egalitarian essay about the importance of the fair treat-
ment of minority students ostensibly for use in campus Race Equality
pamphlet. Next, participants in the hypocrisy condition were made mindful
about past failures to be fair by writing about a situation in which they
personally reacted more negatively to an Asian person than they should have.
Participants in the control condition were not made mindful, and all partici-
pants then completed a measure of negative affect. After the experimenter
announced that the study was complete, all where asked to help a committee
make a decision about how to cut next year’s budget for student organ-
izations on campus. The main dependent variable was the percentage
of budget cuts recommended for the Asian Students Association (ASA).
The results showed that the aversive racists in the hypocrisy condition
recommended significantly lower budget cuts for the ASA compared with
aversive racists in the control condition and low prejudice individuals in
either condition. Aversive racists in the hypocrisy condition also reported
higher levels of guilt compared with the other groups, although guilt was
not significantly related to the level of budget cuts recommended. Import-
antly, independent coders reported that whereas truly low prejudiced and
aversive racists both wrote equally strong essays and recalled equally severe
examples of biased responses towards Asians in the past, aversive racists
tended to recall more recent examples of biased behavior compared with
low-prejudice individuals. The temporal difference supports the idea that
if they have trouble coming up with recent examples, people may con-
clude that their past failures do not represent a meaningful or important
discrepancy from their pro-social standards. If recalling past failures is
easy, in part because they represent recent examples, then people may
be more likely to perceive that their past behavior is discrepant from their
advocated standards and be motivated to bring their actions into line with
their beliefs.
In summary, the research reviewed in this section points to several
important parameters to the use of the hypocrisy procedures for changing
behavior. Specifically, the induction of hypocrisy appears to exert its
greatest effect on behavior change when people publicly advocate the
importance of the target course of action and then are privately reminded
of their own recent personal failures to perform the target behavior. The data
indicate that the hypocrisy procedure induces a lower level of discomfort,
or motivates the use of self-justification strategies for dissonance reduction,
when people simply learn or think about the behavior, focus on the
failures of others, or are publicly identified with past personal failures to
perform the target behavior.
Hypocrisy, Culture and Interpersonal Processes

As contemporary research in dissonance has turned its attention to
investigate cross cultural (e.g., Kitayama, Snibbe, & Markus, 2004; Hoshino-
Browne et al., 2005) and interpersonal processes (Norton, Monin, Cooper,
& Hogg, 2003), so has research on hypocrisy. For example, Takaku et al
(2001a, b, 2006) have proposed the dissonance–attribution model of
interpersonal forgiveness (Takaku, 2001a), which predicts that when
people are the victim of another’s misdeed, the attributions and emotions
experienced by the injured party (IP) prevent them from accepting an
apology and forgiving the wrong doer (WD). However, IPs will be more
likely to forgive a WD if they are induced to experience hypocrisy about
their own transgressions. Specifically, when induced to take the perspective
of the WD, IPs become aware of a discrepancy between the normative
belief that people should be held responsible for their misdeeds, and their
own tendency to blame others or the situation when they themselves

transgress. To reduce (or avoid) the dissonance associated with their
hypocrisy, IPs become motivated to forgive the WD and are more likely
to attribute the cause of the transgression to the situation.
In one study (Takaku, 2001a), participants were asked to either imagine
a time when they hurt another person (WD) or were hurt by another
person (IP). All were then asked to imagine being the victim in a scenario
where another student carelessly destroyed their lecture notes for an
upcoming exam. The results showed that among both American and
Japanese samples, participants who were reminded of their own past wrong-
doing were more likely to accept the apology than those not made mindful
of their own past transgressions. Furthermore, hypocrisy participants made
more favorable attributions for their destroyed notes, and they experienced
more positive and less negative emotional reactions. Finally, path analyses
showed that in both samples, the relationship between the perspective-
taking manipulation and the participants’ decision to forgive was mediated
by the hypocrisy-induced discomfort. Takaku et al. (2006) have reported
similar effects using the hypocrisy procedure cross-culturally to reduce
road rage and motivate forgiveness of careless drivers.
There is also recent evidence that people can experience dissonance
vicariously through the hypocritical behavior of others (e.g., Norton
et al., 2003). Fernandez, Stone, Cooper, and Cascio, Hogg (forthcoming)
hypothesized that if an individual shares a strong social bond with another
in-group member, then an act of hypocrisy by an in-group member could
threaten the integrity of the in-group. In order to restore the integrity of
the in-group and reduce their dissonance, in-group members would be
motivated to bolster their attitudes and behavior in support of the in-group
hypocrite’s advocacy. Thus, vicarious hypocrisy would induce observers
to become more favorable toward the course of action advocated by an
in-group hypocrite.
To test the effect of vicarious hypocrisy on attitudes toward the target
behavior, participants who moderately or highly identified with their
university evaluated a recorded message on the importance of using
sunscreen to reduce skin cancer. The speaker was portrayed as either
an in-group (same university) or an out-group member (rival university).
Perceived hypocrisy was manipulated when the speaker admitted or did
not admit to previous failures to use sunscreen. The results showed
that when exposed to a hypocritical in-group member, highly identified
in-group observers reported more favorable attitudes toward the use of
sunscreen compared to in-group observers exposed to an out-group hypo-
crite or to an in-group member who only advocated sunscreen use. A
second experiment replicated and extended this finding by showing that
vicarious hypocrisy induced more attitude bolstering, and more interest
in acquiring sunscreen when the observers shared multiple identities with
the in-group target. In a third experiment, affirming the valued social
identity prior to observing an in-group member behave hypocritically

significantly reduced the attitude bolstering effect observed in a non-
affirmation control condition. Thus, it seems that people can experience
hypocrisy vicariously, and be motivated to enhance their attitudes and
intentions toward the target behavior, when they observe a person with
whom they share an important social identity admit that he or she does
not practice what was preached.
Caveats and Future Directions

The research described above indicates that the dissonance aroused by
hypocrisy can motivate people to take the steps necessary to change a
large variety of pro-social behaviors. Nevertheless, there are several ques-
tions about the hypocrisy effect that are not addressed by the research
reviewed in this paper. The working model of hypocrisy assumes that to
arouse the dissonance that motivates behavior change, people must process
a discrepancy between two cognitions: that they have publicly advocated
the importance of performing a pro-social behavior to an audience, and
the perception that in the recent past, they have not performed the
behavior themselves. The pairing of these two factors assumes (i) that
people hold positive attitudes and beliefs toward the topic of their advo-
cacy, and (ii) that they do not perform the behavior every time they have
the opportunity. A few studies above shed light on how these factors
operate together, but there are large gaps in our understanding of the
processes that underlie the effectiveness of hypocrisy as an intervention.
For example, no study to date has tested the assumption that people
must hold a positive attitude toward the behavior in order for hypocrisy
to motivate behavior change. It has been shown in numerous studies that
advocating a counter-attitudinal position by itself arouses dissonance
(assuming responsibility and forseeability for the act are high; Cooper &
Fazio, 1984). If the pro-social behavior was counter-attitudinal for the
speaker, advocating that other people perform the behavior should cause
dissonance. However, the inconsistency might subsequently be resolved
when they are made mindful of their own personal past failures if the past
lapses are perceived as consistent with the preexisting negative attitude.
Thus, it may be critical for motivating behavior change that people
support what they advocate in the first step of a hypocrisy procedure.
It is also important to investigate more fully the process by which
reflecting on past failures induces hypocrisy and the motivation to change.
One important variable may be the degree to which people perceive their
past failures as beyond their control. Just as perceptions of choice for
counter-attitudinal act affect attributions of responsibility and the level of
dissonance that ensues (e.g., Cooper & Fazio, 1984), the perception of
responsibility for past failures to perform the target behavior may affect
the dissonance that follows from hypocrisy. In a study designed to test the
role of choice in the desire to exercise following hypocrisy, Barquissau and

Stone (2000) had participants advocate the importance of regular exercise,
after which they focused on perceptions of high or low choice over past
failures to exercise regularly. The data showed that when asked to exercise
by riding a stationary bike as far as possible in 10 minutes, hypocrisy
participants who focused on high choice not to exercise in the past rode
further than participants who focused on failures to exercise that were
framed as beyond their control. These results are consistent with many
other studies in the dissonance literature showing that dissonance motivation
is attenuated when people perceive ‘sufficient justification’, such as the
presence of high incentives or low choice, for conducting a discrepant act.
In the case of hypocrisy, if people think of ‘good’ reasons for failing to
perform the behavior in the past, they may not perceive that their behavior
represents an important discrepancy. In contrast, the perception that past
failures were under volitional control may signal that there was ‘insuffi-
cient justification’ for failing to perform the target behavior. Thus, when
people focus on especially ‘bad’ reasons for failing to perform the behavior,
they may feel more responsible for their hypocrisy and become more
motivated to perform the target behavior. An important direction for
future research is to determine whether other traditional moderators of
dissonance processes (e.g., consequences and forseeability) influence the
effect of hypocrisy on behavior.
In addition, we presently do not know how many instances of past
failure people need to consider in order to perceive a hypocritical discrep-
ancy. The original theory of cognitive dissonance predicts that the more
examples of past failures people bring to mind, the more inconsistent
cognitions that are made accessible, and the more dissonance that may be
aroused (Festinger, 1957). However, the study by Son Hing et al. (2002)
described above suggested that holding the quantity of past failures
constant, considering more recent past failures may cause greater dissonance
than considering distant past failures, suggesting that ‘more’ is not neces-
sarily ‘better’; the way people construe past failures can also influence the
dissonance aroused when made mindful.
Work on autobiographical memory may provide important insights into
construal processes that affect the effect of past behavior on the induction
of hypocrisy. Ross and Wilson (2002), for example, report that when
people reflect on past failures, if they can distance the event from their
perception of their current self, it no longer presents a threat to self-esteem.
In a related area of research, Libby and Eibach (2002; see also Libby,
Eibach, & Gilovich, 2005) report that viewing past failures from a third
person perspective leads people to perceive that their current self has
changed more than when they view past failures from a first person
perspective. Both lines of work suggest that an effective induction of dis-
sonance via hypocrisy may require that people take a first person perspective
on their past failures to perform the pro-social act. Viewing past failures
from a first person perspective may prevent distancing and the perception
that the past failures were committed by a different self, either of which
could reduce the perception of an important discrepancy between past
behavior and the advocated standards.
Whereas it might seem from the previous research on hypocrisy that
people automatically take a first person perspective when considering past
failures to perform the target behavior, we doubt that this is the case.
Recent research on the observation and attribution of hypocrisy in other
people suggests that making the public advocacy first may prime a first
person perspective. Specifically, Barden, Rucker, and Petty (2005) show
that when people observe a target person’s act of hypocrisy, if the target’s
past failures are revealed before the target advocates performing the
pro-social behavior, perceivers are less likely to label the target as a hypo-
crite, compared with when perceivers observe the target’s advocacy
before learning about his or her past failures. One explanation for this
finding is that when knowledge of a person’s failures precedes his or her
public advocacy of the behavior, observers infer that the inconsistent
individual must have learned from the past failures and changed for the
better. Observing another’s advocacy and then learning about past failures
garners a harsher interpretation for the target. Thus, when people already
know that a speaker has failed in the past, they do not make the same
dispositional attribution about hypocrisy that they make when a speaker
is ‘caught’ acting inconsistently after an advocacy is made.
This suggests the possibility that, by having people advocate the stand-
ards for behavior before they are made mindful of past failures to uphold
the standards, they take a first person perspective on their hypocritical
discrepancy. Thus, they perceive that the discrepancy represents a chal-
lenge to their self-integrity, which they become motivated to reduce. No
study has examined this directly although it is worth noting that some
studies, including the original by Aronson et al. (1991), achieved the
hypocrisy effect by inducing mindfulness before participants made the
speech. Nevertheless, it remains possible that the order in which people
are made aware of the discrepancy between their past behavior and
pro-social attitudes and beliefs affects how people interpret their past
failures (e.g., Libby et al., 2002, 2005), which could impact the level of
motivation to alter their behavior. These speculations merit attention in
future research.
Finally, there are likely to be important individual differences in
responses to the hypocrisy procedure. High self-monitors (Snyder &
Tanke, 1976) and people low in preference for consistency (Cialdini,
Trost, & Newsom, 1995), for example, may experience less dissonance
following an act of hypocrisy. Self-esteem differences can also moderate
reactions to hypocrisy, but the nature of the moderation depends on
the standards people advocate for the target behavior. According to the
self-standards model of cognitive dissonance (SSM; see Stone & Cooper,
2001), advocating the normative standard for behavior and being made
mindful of past failures to uphold the norm should cause most people
to perceive a discrepancy and become motivated to perform the target
behavior. However, the behavior change that follows hypocritical behavior
may not occur for people with low self-esteem if they advocate their own
personal standards to others. Specifically, if they focus on their own
personal standards for behavior and then are made mindful of past failures,
people with low self-esteem may perceive that their past failures are
consistent with their negative self-expectancies for honesty and sincerity
(Aronson, 1968; Stone, 2003). Thus, they may not perceive a discrepancy
and be motivated to take action. Alternatively, because of their more
positive expectancies for being honest and sincere about important issues,
being mindful of failures to perform the target behavior should induce
dissonance for people with high self-esteem. Thus, self-esteem should
moderate the hypocrisy effect when people advocate their own personal
standards for behavior.
A recent experiment examined the self-standards prediction for how
self-esteem will moderate the hypocrisy effect (Stone & Fernandez, forth-
coming). Participants with high or low self-esteem in this study were
asked to construct a persuasive message about the importance of using
sunscreen to reduce their risk for skin cancer. Some participants were
instructed to base their message on their perception of the normative
standards for using sunscreen; others were instructed to compose their
message by using their own personal standards for using sunscreen.
After being made mindful of recent personal failures to use sunscreen, all
were provided coupons to exchange for a free sample of sunscreen at the
campus health center. The data showed that as predicted by the self-
standards model (Stone & Cooper, 2001), both high and low self-esteem
participants were more likely to exchange their coupon at the health center
when they advocated the normative standards for using sunscreen com-
pared to a no-dissonance control condition. In contrast, participants with
high self-esteem were more likely than those with low self-esteem to
acquire sunscreen when both hypocrisy groups advocated their own per-
sonal standards for the target behavior. These findings suggest that whereas
focusing people on advocating the normative standards for behavior may be
necessary to induce dissonance in the majority of a given sample, there
may be other individual difference variables that interact with what people
advocate to determine for whom hypocrisy motivates behavior change.
Broader Implications for Theories of Behavior Change

In considering the utility of the hypocrisy procedure as an intervention
for motivating changes in behavior, it is important to discuss how it fits
with contemporary models of behavior change like those developed in the
health literature. In our view, the use of hypocrisy as an intervention for
motivating behavior change fits quite well with many of the contemporary
models like the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991), the Transthe-
oretical Model (Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992), the Health
Belief Model (Rosenstock, Strecher, & Becker, 1988), and protection
motivation theory (Maddux & Rogers, 1983). Among these models, it is
generally recognized that people start by moving through the stages or
steps required to initiate the new behavior, before they proceed through
the stages or steps necessary to maintain the new behavior (Rothman,
2000). The hypocrisy procedure may be an effective strategy for influencing
the factors that determine the decision to initiate and maintain a new
behavior at each stage or step in the process.
The current literature shows that the hypocrisy procedure is effective
for motivating people to perform the target behavior when they are
knowledgeable about its benefits and hold positive attitudes toward
performing it, but currently do not perform the behavior as often or as
well as the standards proscribe. In many contemporary models of behavior
change, this may represent the stages or steps where people have contem-
plated initiating change, prepared to take action and may even have
attempted to perform the behavior in a limited fashion. The research
suggests that the induction of a hypocritical discrepancy may help people
move from entertaining the goal of change toward the steps necessary to
achieve that goal.
The procedure can also be modified to influence the decision processes
at other stages of change. For example, when people are in an earlier stage
of initiation where they are unaware of the behavior, do not know about
the benefits to be gained from it, or do not know how to perform it, the
hypocrisy procedure could be used to motivate them to learn about the
benefits of the target behavior and how to carry it out (i.e., a ‘teachable
moment’, see McBride, Emmons, & Lipkus, 2003). One outcome of this
approach may be increased memory for new information about the new
behavior and also the formation of positive attitudes and intentions toward
taking the first step. We believe the model is sufficiently flexible to permit
targeting for specific stages of initiation and also the cultural tailoring of
the materials to assure that the hypocritical discrepancy includes cognitions
that are important and relevant to a given social group (Festinger, 1957;
see Hoshino-Browne et al., 2005, for a discussion of the cultural applicability
of dissonance processes).
With respect to motivating consistent and sustained performance of a
new behavior, reviews tend to conclude that very few interventions
are successful at both influencing the initiation of a new behavior and also
the maintenance of the new behavior (Rothman, 2000). One reason
that interventions do not carry over is that the psychological processes that
guide the initiation of a new behavior may be different from those that
guide the continued performance of the target act. Indeed, previous
research is mixed regarding how well hypocrisy motivates long-term
behavior change (e.g., Aronson et al., 1991; Fried & Aronson, 1995; but
see Kantola et al., 1984). Whereas this could suggest that an intervention
based on hypocrisy may only be effective for motivating people to initiate
a new behavior, we believe that this conclusion is premature because few
studies in the hypocrisy literature have focused directly on motivating
people to engage in the process of behavior maintenance.
One way to induce hypocrisy about behavior maintenance after people
have initiated the target behavior may be to simply remind them of
their previous hypocritical discrepancy. The presence of subtle cues related
to the previous failure to practice what was preached may reinstate
dissonance and the motivation to perform the behavior (e.g., Higgins,
Rhodewaldt, & Zanna, 1979). Such cues may account for the mainte-
nance effect reported by Kantola et al. (1984). Specifically, if homeowners
kept the letter sent to them stating that they were wasting electricity,
it may have served as a reminder of the discrepancy between their pro-
energy conservation beliefs and past failures to conserve energy (cf. Dal
Cin, MacDonald, Fong, Zanna, & Elton-Marshall, 2006). An important
limitation to relying exclusively on this approach, however, is the possi-
bility that people may eventually habituate to the dissonance caused by
reminder cues until the discrepancy has little effect on their desire to
continue performing the target behavior (Cooper, 1998).
Another way to motivate maintenance of a new behavior is to induce
hypocrisy specifically about behavior maintenance. Recall that research by
Stone et al. (1997) showed that the dissonance induced by hypocrisy stems
from a threat to self-integrity; when faced with a hypocritical discrepancy,
people can be motivated to perform the behavior in order to restore the
perception that they were honest and sincere about their advocacy to
others. When focused on being hypocritical about initiating the behavior,
people should be motivated to perform the behavior as a means to restore
their self-integrity. However, the act of initiating the behavior immedi-
ately after the intervention may reduce the dissonance and restore the
perception of self-integrity, which could leave very little motivation to
sustain the new course of action. Alternatively, if focused on being
hypocritical about sustaining or maintaining the behavior over time, the
hypocritical discrepancy could motivate people to restore their self-integrity
by performing the behavior more regularly in the future. Thus, an effective
way to motivate sustained behavior change may be to switch the framing
of the hypocrisy from the initiation of a behavior to the maintenance of
the behavior. In other words, have people who have initiated change stake
their self-integrity on performing the behavior on a more consistent basis.
We believe that the an effective approach to make people feel hypo-
critical about maintaining a new behavior is to start by having them
advocate the importance of performing the behavior consistently over
time. In addition to emphasizing the benefits of performing the new
behavior on a continuous basis, it could also be useful to have people
advocate the importance of careful planning to avoid relapses. To promote

careful planning, speakers could talk about the utility of forming imple-
mentation intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999). Specifically, the advocacy materials
could include information about the situations that are ideal for performing
the behavior, and speakers could be encouraged to talk about the type of
‘if in this situation-then perform this action’ associations that eventually
facilitate automated action. In addition, speakers could stress the import-
ance of practicing cognitive and behavioral skills that are designed to
prevent behavioral lapses (Schwarzer, 1992). After they advocate the
benefits and mechanics of behavior maintenance, participants could then
be made mindful of how they recently failed to follow through on their
own personal implementation plans, and failed to practice the relapse
skills, as regularly as they could. The discrepancy between their beliefs
about the importance of maintaining the new behavior over time, and
their past failures to follow through, should pose a challenge to self-
integrity that is not easily resolved by performing the behavior only once
or irregularly in the future. The most direct way to restore their honesty
and sincerity about maintaining the behavior would be to take their own
good advice and perform the target behavior on a regular basis over time.
With a little ingenuity, the hypocrisy procedure may prove useful for just
this purpose.
Final Thoughts
Fifty years ago, Leon Festinger (1957) introduced a powerful theory for
understanding and promoting behavior change. The available data indicate
that people can be motivated by cognitive dissonance to perform a wide
variety of pro-social behavior when the inconsistency they experience
follows from an act of hypocrisy. Furthermore, the research indicates that
hypocrisy has its greatest effect on behavior change when people publicly
advocate the importance of the pro-social behavior and then are privately
reminded of their own recent personal failures to perform the target behavior.
Under these conditions, the dissonance aroused by a hypocritical discrep-
ancy seems to direct most people toward taking the steps that are necessary
to bring their behavior back into line with their pro-social beliefs. The
results of dozens of studies show that when applied appropriately, the
hypocrisy procedure may be useful for motivating people to initiate and
maintain new behaviors that benefit them and those with whom the
interact (e.g., see Seijts & Latham, 2003, for a discussion of how hypocrisy
can be applied in organizational settings).
In the final analysis, it seems unfortunate that observers are so quick to
form and express negative impressions of people who ‘talk the talk’ but
do not ‘walk the walk’. Whereas there are clear benefits to maintaining
consistency between what they say and what they do, it is also important
to recognize the benefits of allowing people to realize their acts of hypocrisy
without making them feel humiliated or shamed in the process. A

moment of self-insight may well set the stage for them to make positive
changes that benefit the individual as well as society.
Short Biographies
Jeff Stone received his BA with honors from San Jose State University
in 1988 and his PhD in Psychology from the University of California at
Santa Cruz in 1993. He then taught and conducted research as a visiting
fellow at Princeton University before accepting a position in 1997 as an
assistant professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. He was
promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure in 2003. Dr.
Stone is the director of two research labs in the Psychology Department
at the University of Arizona. His research in the Self and Attitudes lab
develops new influence strategies that are used to promote health
behavior and the reduction of prejudice. His work has been funded by
the National Science Foundation and by various state and local grants.
In the Social Psychology of Sport Lab, Dr. Stone investigates the
causes and consequences of racial and gender stereotypes for athletic
performance. His work on the role of stereotypes in sports has been
featured in programs on National Public Radio and the BBC, in Newsweek
magazine, on the television show ABC Primetime, and in various news-
paper articles around the world. Dr. Stone’s research appears regularly in
the top journals, edited volumes and textbooks in Social Psychology.
He is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology and is a consulting editor for Basic and Applied Social Psychology.
He has served on NIMH and NSF scientific review panels, consulted at
the National Cancer Institute, and organized international conferences for
the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. At the University of Arizona,
Dr. Stone was recently appointed as an Associate Investigator at the
Arizona Cancer Center, and served for three years as a founding member
of the Social and Behavioral Science IRB committee. Dr. Stone teaches
undergraduate and graduate courses on social psychology, attitudes and
persuasion, the social self, and prejudice and stereotyping, and is named
each year as a ‘favorite professor’ by seniors graduating from the college
of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Nicholas Corona Fernandez is a graduate student in the Psychology
Department at the University of Arizona working with Dr. Jeff Stone.
Nicholas earned his BS in psychology from the University of Texas at El
Paso in 2003 and was a math high school teacher before entering the
doctoral graduate program at Arizona in 2005. His research broadly
explores cognitive dissonance, health and prejudice reduction processes.
Specifically, he is interested in understanding the vicarious effects of
observing an ingroup member perform an act of hypocrisy, the factors
that moderate and mediate behavior change following hypocrisy, and the
prejudice reduction strategies that a target can use to reduce biased

processing and discrimination.
Endnote
* Correspondence address: Psychology Department, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721,
USA. Email: jeffs@email.arizona.edu.
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Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2/2 (2008): 1024–1051, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00088.

To Practice What We Preach: The Use of

motivates them to reduce it by restoring consistency among the relevant

Nevertheless, Festinger also observed that behavior change may not

hypocrisy motivates behavior change as opposed to other forms of dissonance

Testing the Effect of Hypocrisy on Behavior Change

participants could purchase for 10 cents each. Participants were shown a

Changing Behaviors Outside of the Lab

previously said that they believed in conservation (dissonance); they also

Examining the Motivational Assumptions about

restore their self-integrity, or performing a behavior that will leave the

Mapping the Parameters for Behavior Change

Advocating normative standards and commitment

In most of the studies, hypocrisy begins when people advocate a pro-

moral credentials on the topic (Monin & Miller, 2001), or by inducing a

Mindfulness: Private but personal and recent

humiliated or shamed for their past transgressions, which could cause

Hypocrisy, Culture and Interpersonal Processes

own tendency to blame others or the situation when they themselves

identity prior to observing an in-group member behave hypocritically

Caveats and Future Directions

role of choice in the desire to exercise following hypocrisy, Barquissau and

Broader Implications for Theories of Behavior Change

advocate the importance of careful planning to avoid relapses. To promote

without making them feel humiliated or shamed in the process. A

prejudice reduction strategies that a target can use to reduce biased

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