Psychology of Facebook: chance to participate

Dr. B J Fogg, who teaches the Psychology of Facebook course at Stanford , has kindly written by way of a comment to an earlier post, that Mouse Trap readers who wish to know more about the project and want to participate, can join the Facebook group for that course. They keep everything updated on the group page and you can read about what they are doing and how you can participate there.
I, myself, have subscribed to the group as I being a web 2.0 enthusiast too, find the topic to be pertinent and interesting.

They also keep a blog and it is worth checking out. For example one of the recent entries shows how the facebook community is a sucker for apps titled "Share the Love"; but are put off by apps titled 'Declare war'. Apparently web2.0 is all about sharing, caring and making love and not about making war or competing.

By the way, I have seen a trend among bloggers to have a group page on facebook regarding their blog. I'm not sure of the utility of such a page, but an opportunity to connect is always welcome. In case some of you are keen, we can start a mouse trap community on facebook.

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Drug usage likelihood and Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance (as per say Aronson instead of say the original Festinger definition) is a phenomenon whereby if one indulges in a behavior that is not inline with one's normal schema about oneself, then the discrepancy between the actual behavior and one's own self-perception leads to a dissonance (or state of unrest/anxiety), such that one modifies one's internal schema/ self-perception to make it inline with outwardly exhibited behavior. The classical case is a celebrity (who normally smokes) endorsing a public commercial for 'no smoking'. Just after publicly asking others not to smoke, the celebrity would feel a Cognitive Dissonance and to reduce that uneasy feeling may decide to change his/her self-image to be that of non-smoker and this may lead to him/her smoking less in future. If the incentive to indulge in the hypocritical behavior was less (say the endorsement of commercial was for free and the celebrity did not take an excessive amount of money to endorse the ad, then this would lead to more dissonance and vice versa.

There is an article on BPS related to an observation that drug usage likelihood increases subsequently if people are asked about drug usage likelihood earlier
This study leads to several questions.

How does this observation relate to Cognitive Dissonance effect? When the respondents were asked about likelihood of drug usage and (supposedly) they replied in the negative (to please the surveyor), then this small incentive to lie should have ideally led to a large Cognitive Dissonance and prompted them to stop using drugs and led to change in drug-usage behavior to overcome the dissonance experienced. Is some data available as to whether those who reported more drug usage later had replied in affirmative or in negative to the earlier drug-use-likelihood question? Is there a priming effect so strong that it is shadowing the cognitive dissonance effect? This study raises more questions than it answers!

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