by Jenna Bowen
headlines reporter
Fittingly, the week dedicated to lovers and their passion is also devoted to the United States' National Condom Week. The American Sexual Health Association (ASHA) recognizes February 11-17 as Condom Week. Even more appropriately, National Condom Day is on February 14th.
By now many Americans are familiar with the impact sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) have on society. However, despite this awareness, American citizens continue to practice risky sexual behavior, often avoiding safe-sex measures that can prevent such widespread damage and that particularly affect people between the ages of 15 to 24.
So if the information is available, why are so many Americans not protecting themselves? Perhaps this can be accredited not to information and awareness of sexual risks, but to the way in which these factors are conveyed to Americans, and their psychological acceptance.
There is a theory in psychology-formulated by developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget-that individuals progress over time in their cognitive development, beginning with infancy. Piaget focused on how an organism adapts to their environment, described by Piaget as "intelligence." This behavior, or adaptation, is controlled by mental organizations called schemas, which the individual uses to represent the world as well as designate action.
Piaget hypothesized that at infancy, human beings are born with "reflexes" that, as we apply to adaptation, contrast schemas. Humans then continually adapt using two processes: assimilation, the process of using/transforming the environment as it replaces preexisting cognitive structures and adoption, the process of changing cognitive structures to accept something from the environment.
According to Piaget, the adolescence and adulthood stage represents intelligence as demonstrated by the logical use of symbols and related to abstract concepts. Early in this period however, such as college age students, egocentric thought, which is basically thinking that is done in a non-logical, nonreversible manner, is present.
Paired with Piaget's theory of development is David Elkind's work on egocentrism. One of Elkind's more prominent contributions to Psychology is his work with adolescence in which he essentially expands on Piaget's hypothesized adolescent egocentrism (difficulty in distinguishing between one's own mental occupation of themselves, and what others think). Or, an individual might be concerned that others are as obsessed with them, i.e. in matters of physical appearance, as they are with themselves.
"It is this belief that others are preoccupied with his appearance and behavior that constitutes the egocentrism of the adolescent" (Elkind, 1967, p. 1030).
It is at the point of cognitive development that Elkind believes the aspect of personal fable occurs, or an adolescent's risk-taking behavior, accredited to the belief that something so severe or significant, could not happen to them. Thus, when educating American adolescents about the risk factors of sex in a way that is particularly scary or threatening, their cognitive development essentially promotes an individual into denial.
Western Psychology Professor, Tamina Toray, explains, "The best information on why these tactics don't work well comes from ads that were focused on adolescent risk behavior. Such ads used scare tactics such as "don't smoke or you will die." The reason these types of tactics do not work well with adolescents or young adults is that their cognitive development lends itself towards what we call "egocentrism." A specific form of egocentrism at this stage of cognitive development is referred to as the Invincibility Fable, the belief that nothing bad can happen to me. So to use dramatic messages of death, pregnancy, etc... will be a waste of time."
The ASHA, seemingly aware of these theories, promotes the awareness the benefits of condoms not by scary images of genital herpes and HPV, but by factual evidence and a simple message; to use a condom every time, out of both respect for and responsibility for both the individual and their partner.
