License to Sin?

A new study by researchers from Duke, USC, and UPenn is the first to explore how questioning can affect our behavior when we have mixed feelings about an issue. The study, forthcoming in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, found that asking people questions, like how many times they expect to give in to a temptation they know they should resist, increases how many times they will actually give in to it.

"Research on attitude formation has increasingly recognized that attitudes can be comprised of separate negative and positive components which can result in attitude ambivalence," explain Gavin Fitzsimons (Duke University), Joseph Nunes (University of Southern California), and Patti Williams (University of Pennsylvania). "In the present research we focus on vice behaviors, those for which consumers are likely to hold both positive and negative attitudes. We demonstrate that asking consumers to report their expectations regarding how often they will perform a vice behavior increases the incidence of these behaviors."

Intention questions are generally perceived as harmless, and the researchers found that this may cause consumers to lower the guard they would otherwise have with more explicitly persuasive pitches, such as advertising. In a series of three experiments, they demonstrate that seemingly benign questioning may serve as a liberating influence that allows consumers to give in to their desires more often than they would have otherwise.

For example, the researchers asked a group of actual college students how often they intended to skip class in the following week. Another control group of students was asked how often they intended to floss. Over the course of a semester, the group that was asked how often they intended to miss class ended up with one more absence, on average, than the group that was not asked.

As the authors explain: "Despite very real negative repercussions, respondents to a question about their future class attendance engaged in the negative behavior (missing class) at a significantly greater rate than those not asked to predict their behavior."

The results were especially pronounced for those with chronically low self-control, and the researchers point out that their findings pose a public policy dilemma for survey researchers who ask questions about vice behaviors in order to gain insight and discourage them.

"Fortunately, we also document two moderators of the effect that can prevent intention questions from exacerbating indulgences in vices," the researchers write, "(a) having people explicitly consider strategies for how they might avoid the behavior, and (b) having people create a self-reward for sticking with their stated usage patterns."

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Nanotech Could Become Polarizing Like Nuclear Power

Nanotechnology, the science of assembling materials and machines at the atomic scale at a size less than the width of a human hair, may seem very futuristic and exciting. But if not managed properly, it could scare and stir up emotions like nuclear power or global warming, according to a professor at Yale Law School.

"The U.S. public'sperception of nanotechnology is up for grabs. It could divide along the lines of nuclear power, global warming and other contentious environmental issues absent a major public education and engagement effort by industry, government, civic groups and scientists. People who know little or nothing about 'nanotechnology' instantly react in an emotionally charged way to theconcept, and their opinions divide along cultural lines as they learn more about it," says Dan Kahan.

From drugs and medicine to improved technology on the battlefield, nano-engineering has the potential to dramatically improve life -- but only if people aren't scared off first. And nanotechnology is already on its way.

Nanotechnology is the ability to measure, see, manipulate and manufacture things usually between 1 and 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter; a human hair is roughly 100,000 nanometers wide. Morethan $30 billion in products incorporating nanotechnology were sold globally in 2005. By 2014, Lux Research estimates this figure will grow to$2.6 trillion.

Kahan's conclusions are based on the findings of a new web-based public opinion survey of U.S. public perceptions of nanotechnology.

"Essentially, when asked what they think about this new technology, Americans go with their gut instinct -- which usually reflects their views toward other issues like climate change and nuclear power. When they learn more, they tend to adopt a stance about nanotechnology that fits their political and cultural predispositions," says Kahan, one of the principal investigators in the study.

"Nothing in our findings suggests that public polarization over nanotechnology is inevitable," says Don Braman, a professor at The George Washington University. "Our results indicate that another outcome ispossible but unlikely unless government, business, and educators take amore proactive approach to nanotechnology public engagement and communication."

The results from this study of 1,800 persons who were recruited to participate in an online survey experiment were released by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

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