Elliot Aronson’s research while affiliated with University of California, Santa Cruz and other places

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Publications (35)


The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
  • Chapter

June 2010

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1,278 Reads

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167 Citations

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Elliot Aronson

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Kevin Carlsmith


Fear, Denial, and Sensible Action in the Face of Disasters

September 2008

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215 Reads

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30 Citations

Social Research An International Quarterly

1. If a person is a homeowner or even a renter, gaining knowledge pertinent to earthquake preparedness can be much more useful. One can learn to anchor tall bookcases to the wall. One can learn about disconnecting natural gas lines leading into the dwelling to prevent fires, and so on. But when a person is living or working in a public building, there is little one can learn that goes beyond common sense. I have first-hand experience on that score. I was in my office at the University of California at Santa Cruz on October 17, 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. My office was about 10 miles from the epicenter. When the building began to shake, I got scared, stood up, and took three steps toward the door. But the room was shaking so violently that I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get out of the building, so I did the natural, common sense thing: I dived under my desk—a few seconds later, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf came down. If I had been sitting in my chair I would have been buried by books. The point is, I didn’t require a knowledge of earthquakes, their cause, their effects, or what to do in case one hit; what to do was obvious. 2. According to Debra Hauser’s (2004) review of 11 abstinence-only programs across the nation, “Evaluation of these 11 programs showed few short-term benefits and no lasting, positive impact A few programs showed mild success at improving attitudes and intentions to abstain. No program was able to demonstrate a positive impact on sexual behavior over time…. Worse, [these programs] show some negative impacts on youth’s willingness to use contraception, including condoms, to prevent negative sexual health outcomes related to sexual intercourse. Importantly, only in one state did any program demonstrate short-term success in delaying the initiation of sex; none of these programs demonstrates evidence of long-term success in delaying sexual initiation among youth exposed to the programs or any evidence of success in reducing other sexual risk-taking behaviors among participants.”


Using Cognitive Dissonance to Encourage Water Conservation1

July 2006

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2,612 Reads

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360 Citations

Journal of Applied Social Psychology

In a field experiment on water conservation, we aroused dissonance in patrons of the campus recreation facility by making them feel hypocritical about their showering habits. Using a 2 × 2 factorial design, we manipulated subjects “‘mindfulness” that they had sometimes wasted water while showering, and then varied whether they made a “public commitment” urging other people to take shorter showers. The “hypocrisy” condition-in which subjects made the public commitment after being reminded of their past behavior-was expected to be dissonance-arousing, thereby motivating subjects to increase their efforts to conserve water. The results were consistent with this reasoning. Compared to controls, subjects in the hypocrisy condition took significantly shorter showers. Subjects who were merely reminded that they had wasted water, or who only made the public commitment, did not take shorter showers than control subjects. The findings have implications for using cognitive dissonance as means of changing behavior in applied settings, especially those in which people already support the desired goal, but their behavior is not consistent with those beliefs.


Using Social Cognition and Persuasion to Promote Energy Conservation: A Quasi‐Experiment1

July 2006

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548 Reads

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126 Citations

Journal of Applied Social Psychology

A quasi-experiment was conducted to determine if the effectiveness of the R.C.S. Home Energy Audit Program could be improved by training auditors to use social-psychological principles during the audit procedure. Nine experienced home energy auditors attended two 1-day workshops in which they were trained to: (a) communicate vividly; (b) personalize their recommendations to homeowners; (c) induce commitment; and (d) frame their recommendations in terms of “loss” rather than “gain”. The effectiveness of the trained auditors was compared with a control group of experienced auditors who did not receive specific training. Both telephone interview data and utility company records pointed to the success of the auditor training. In interviews, customers served by the trained auditors reported a greater likelihood of acting on the auditors' recommendations, and a large number of these customers reported applying for utility programs to finance retrofits. Utility records validated these customer claims: A significantly larger number of customers served by trained auditors actually did apply for retrofit finance programs. A longitudinal measure of actual energy consumption showed no difference between experimental and control households. Taken as a whole, these findings demonstrate the potential for using principles uncovered in the social psychological laboratory to design applied interventions.


Sozialpsychologie

January 2006

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402 Reads

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9 Citations

Dieses international weit verbreitete Lehrbuch von einem der weltweit angesehensten Sozialpsychologen benutzt einen erzählerischen Ansatz, um die Inhalte der Sozialpsychologie in anschaulicher, unterhaltsamer und einprägsamer Weise zu vermitteln. Dadurch wird dem Studenten die ganze Bandbreite der Sozialpsychologie nahe gebracht. Beispiele aus dem realen Leben inklusive der detaillierten Beschreibung klassischer und moderner Experimente erhöhen den angewandten, anwendbaren und nachvollziehbaren Nutzen für den Studenten.


Sozialpsychologie
  • Article
  • Full-text available

January 2004

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23,087 Reads

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20 Citations

Originaltext vom Verlag; nicht vom SfBS bearbeitet, pdf-Datei nicht ausdruckbar, doc-Datei und txt-Datei ohne Fotos und Graphiken. 4., aktualisierte Auflage Dieses international weit verbreitete Lehrbuch von einem der weltweit angesehensten Sozialpsychologen benutzt einen erzählerischen Ansatz, um die Inhalte der Sozialpsychologie in anschaulicher, unterhaltsamer und einprägsamer Weise zu vermitteln. Dadurch wird dem Studenten die ganze Bandbreite der Sozialpsychologie nahe gebracht. Beispiele aus dem realen Leben inklusive der detaillierten Beschreibung klassischer und moderner Experimente erhöhen den angewandten, anwendbaren und nachvollziehbaren Nutzen für den Studenten.

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The Power of Self-Persuasion

November 1999

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1,932 Reads

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403 Citations

American Psychologist

In contrast with traditional, direct techniques of persuasion (advertising, political rhetoric, etc.), self-persuasion is indirect and entails placing people in situations where they are motivated to persuade themselves to change their own attitudes or behavior. We find that where important attitudes, behavior, or lifestyle changes are concerned, self-persuasion strategies produce more powerful and more long-lasting effects than do direct techniques of persuasion. This is primarily due to the fact that in direct persuasion, members of an audience are constantly aware of the fact that someone is trying (or has tried) to influence them. In a self-persuasion situation, people are convinced that the motivation for change comes from within. In the present address, the author reviews a range of his research on self-persuasion and underscores its relevance to current societal problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)



When Exemplification Fails: Hypocrisy and the Motive for Self-Integrity

February 1997

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240 Reads

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204 Citations

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Two experiments investigated how the dissonance that follows a hypocritical behavior is reduced when 2 alternatives are available; a direct strategy (changing behavior to make it less hypocritical) or an indirect strategy (the affirmation of an unrelated positive aspect of the self). In Experiment 1, after dissonance was aroused by hypocrisy, significantly more participants chose to reduce dissonance directly, despite the clear availability of a self-affirmation strategy. In Experiment 2, participants again chose direct resolution of their hypocritical discrepancy, even when the opportunity to affirm the self held more importance for their global self-worth. The discussion focuses on the mechanisms that influence how people select among readily available strategies for dissonance reduction.


Citations (31)


... Often, this is explored in terms of moral cleansing and moral licensing (Mullen & Monin, 2016;Sachdeva et al., 2009), or moral balancing (e.g., Ploner & Regner, 2013). Similar research has been conducted in the context of hypocrisy and dissonance reduction (Stone et al., 1997;Stone & Focella, 2011), and in terms of collective action against injustices (e.g., Lodewijkx et al., 2008). Together, these different lines of research (which we refer to under the umbrella of moral self-regulation) suggest that individuals are likely to feel their MSC is threatened when they (or their in-group) are implicated in immoral behavior (e.g., Monin et al., 2008;Sachdeva et al., 2009;Tetlock et al., 2000). ...

Reference:

Moral Self-Regulation and Recycling: Does Feeling Guilty Make Us Want to Recycle More?
When Exemplification Fails: Hypocrisy and the Motive for Self-Integrity

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

... At times, it may appear that the evidence refutes the utility of social marketing attempts, because we find that such campaigns may be inefficient or even backfire. This conclusion would be an overgeneralization, however, because most of the problems arise primarily in the campaigns that are not at all informed by the relevant theory and evidence (Aronson, 1991). When armed with the relevant theory and evidence, public information and social marketing campaigns aimed at lifestyle change should be quite successful. ...

How to Change Behavior
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 1991

... Zusammenfassend lassen sich Einstellungen als subjektive Bewertungen von Menschen, Objekten oder Ideen beschreiben. Dabei können diese Bewertungen sowohl positiv als auch negativ gerichtet sein und zu einem entsprechenden Verhalten führen (Aronson, Wilson & Akert, 2008;Greenwald & Banaji, 1995;Kotler & Bliemel, 2006;Trommsdorff & Teichert, 2011). ...

Sozialpsychologie
  • Citing Book
  • January 2006

... Environmental citizenship behaviour would not be sustained without continuous contingencies (Pelletier et al., 1998). Motivating behaviour as a means of gaining insight into behavioural persistence was proposed as a method of study (Aronson & Gonzales, 1990). Thus, considering intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is key to eco-citizenship behaviour persistence (De Young, 1986). ...

Alternative Social Influence Processes Applied to Energy Conservation
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 1990

... Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions in a 2 (distance manipulation: close versus distant consequences) x 2 (distance accentuation: accentuation versus no accentuation) between-participants design (see the randomization check in Supplement 2.1). This experimental setup follows the standard methodological practices in social psychology, aimed at establishing causal relationships by manipulating independent variables and observing their effects on dependent variables under controlled conditions (see Aronson et al 1998). First, participants read a scientific report that presented either spatially and temporally proximal or distal consequences of climate change 5 . ...

The Handbook of Social Psychology
  • Citing Article
  • January 1998

... Both studies imply that values relating to profligate and often careless use of energy and electricity have been built into the country's infrastructure. Once these values concerning familiarity, electricity, and consumption are formed, whatever they may be, they tend to be very difficult to alter, especially when transmitted between generations (Brehm, 1956;Stern and Aronson, 1984). ...

Energy Use: The Human Dimension
  • Citing Article
  • January 1986

Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews

... Findings showed that as individuals' neuroticism decreased, their commitment to staying at home and adhering to self-isolation increased. Similar to our findings, peek et al., and Aronson et al. indicated that people with neurotic fears and anxieties have a strong tendency to use the defense mechanism of denial and use this mechanism to overcome their inner anxiety and fear and do more risky actions (26,27). In addition, high neuroticism leads to undesirable coping behaviors (28). ...

Fear, Denial, and Sensible Action in the Face of Disasters
  • Citing Article
  • September 2008

Social Research An International Quarterly

... Eliot Aronson (2012), a student of Festinger, noted that dissonance effects are greatest when two conditions are present: (1) when people feel personally responsible for their actions and (2) their actions have serious consequences. This is because dissonance reduction is an ego-defensive process that allows people to maintain positive images of themselves that is consonant with their morals and values (Aronson et al., 2013;McLeod, 2018). ...

Social Psychology
  • Citing Book
  • January 2009

... Both price and incentive-based DR programs are based on the assumption of rationality and utility maximization borrowed from microeconomic theory, arguing that people are selfinterested, instrumental, and behave as rational actors who consistently weigh the expected costs and benefits of their actions [165], [172]. However, individuals do not always make rational decisions [173]. Their decisions could depend on other social-psychological factors, such as cognitive load, motivation, emotions, trust, perceived risk, and behavioral control [174]. ...

The Effectiveness of Incentives for Residential Energy Conservation
  • Citing Article
  • April 1986

Evaluation Review

Paul C. Stern

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Elliot Aronson

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John M. Darley

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[...]

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Thomas J. Wilbanks

... Assessing the theoretical background of a phenomenon which has received relatively little academic attention is, in many ways, a difficult task. However, research into hypocrisy is not a complete void; there has been some work within sociology (Feinberg 2002;Wieting 2015) and organisational studies (Effron et al. 2018;Lauriano et al. 2021), and even work exploring its cognitive realisation (Fried and Aronson, 1995). Likely the most prolific writer on hypocrisy is David Runciman (2006Runciman ( , 2008 who explores hypocrisy in politics -a field that is perhaps unsurprising to focus on, especially given the comments already discussed in Section 1. ...

Hypocrisy, Misattribution, and Dissonance Reduction

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin