The aim of this study was to encourage inhabitants in a French city to take their trash cans in after they had been collected, in order to not clutter the street during the day. A total of 164 households were approached by city officials and three different interventions were compared: the first was based on binding communication, the second on binding communication coupled with the hypocrisy paradigm, and a third was an informational message. Changes in the mean percentages of trash cans left on the street before and after the interventions indicated that binding communication was significantly more effective than the other two interventions. The fact that the hypocrisy paradigm can block the effect of binding communication is discussed in terms of the dissonance reduction mode.
Pascual et al. (Mon,) studied this question.