The study of compliance has revealed a handy toolkit of methods to bring someone else’s behavior in line with a request. As you learn about these methods, you’ll notice how they are used all the time by advertisers, salespeople, and others who are in the business of influencing your consumer behavior. In fact, many of these methods were discovered when the social psychologist Bob Cialdini spent a few years undercover, going into car dealerships and taking other sales positions to find out which sales techniques are the most effective for getting people to pull out their credit cards (Cialdini, 2006). Of course, methods of compliance are also useful outside the marketplace for changing a range of behaviors, from getting your roommate to do the dishes to getting people to give generously to charities. Next, we review the most well-established of these methods.

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Imagine that you are participating in the following study by Burger and Caldwell (2003). In one condition, you spend time completing several questionnaires. At the end of the study, you are asked if you would be willing to volunteer a couple of hours the following weekend helping to sort food donations for a local homeless shelter. If you are like most participants, you probably would come up with some excuse for why you wouldn’t have the time. In this condition, only 32% of the participants volunteered. But now rerun the simulation with the following change: At the very beginning of the session, another participant asks if you might be willing to sign a petition to increase awareness about the plight of the homeless. This is an easy enough thing to agree to, and you add your name to the list. But having done so, you now feel like a champion of the underprivileged. What happens when you are next asked to spend your Saturday afternoon sifting through food donations? In the real experiment, 51% of the participants complied with the fairly substantial larger request if they had first complied with a smaller request (FIGURE 7.7). This significant increase in compliance resulted from simply carrying out an initial, smaller request.

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The foot-in-the door effect happens because when a person complies with a small request, she is likely to infer that she is the type of person who helps others or is interested in the particular cause. Because of this shift in self-perception, the person becomes more receptive to the related but larger second request. Indeed, once she has this new view of herself, refusing the second request would likely arouse dissonance.

This raises an interesting possibility: If a person initially complies with a small request for extrinsic reasons, such as a monetary reward, will she be less likely to infer that she is the helping type? Perhaps yes, if she attributes her compliance to the extrinsic factor. In this case, when she is later asked to comply with a larger request, she will feel less pressure to act in ways that are consistent with her self-image. This point was also illustrated in Burger and Caldwell’s (2003) study (see FIGURE 7.6): When participants were offered a dollar to sign a petition, they were no more willing to comply with a second, larger request to volunteer at the homeless shelter, presumably because they inferred that they signed the petition for the dollar, not because of who they were or what they believed. The role of self-perception processes is also illustrated in an additional condition in which, after signing the petition, participants were explicitly told by the requestor what caring and thoughtful people they are. Participants in this condition were much more likely to comply with the large request, because the compliment reinforced their image of themselves as thoughtful. With this strengthened self-perception, they were even more likely to act in ways that were consistent with it. This might be why we often seek to butter up a person before we ask him to do us a favor. By flattering the person for being generous or caring, for example, we validate a self-perception that he then may be more likely to uphold.

Our motivation to view ourselves as consistent also contributes to a social norm to honor our commitments. Once you make a public agreement, it is considered bad form to back out on your half of that agreement. This norm for social commitment underlies the strong sense of trust that is one of the building blocks of cooperative relationships. Most of the time, behaving in line with such a norm will foster healthy social bonds. Those who renege on their agreements earn a reputation for being undependable, flaky, and untrustworthy. But the norm for social commitment can get you to do things you might not otherwise want to do.

For example, this norm can make you feel trapped in a decision and forced to accept a lowball offer. Lowballing can take different forms, but the general principle is that after agreeing to an offer, people find it hard to break that commitment even if they later learn of some extra cost to the deal. Consider this technique in the context of trying to sell someone a new car. The strategy is to offer the customer what seems like a great deal and get him to commit to the idea of buying that particular new car. Then only after the customer has already mentally committed to buy the car is a certain “error in calculation” or “salesperson-manager miscommunication” revealed that raises the price. Although the customer might not have signed the deal for this new price if it had been the initial quote, he now finds it hard to say “no.”

Researchers have studied lowballing in a number of real-life contexts. In one such study (Cialdini et al., 1978), researchers called participants and recruited them to take part in a psychology experiment. When participants were immediately told that the study would be taking place at 7:00 in the morning, only 24% agreed to sign up. But the compliance rate more than doubled (56%) when people were first asked if they wanted to participate in a study and only after they said “yes” were informed that it took place at 7:00 in the morning. These students were no more thrilled than the first group about having to get up so early, but even when given the chance to change their minds, none of them went back on their initial commitment. What’s more, 95% of them actually showed up for the study!

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Lowballing is different from the foot-in-the-door request because it requires only an initial commitment that binds one to an agreement with another person, not the enactment of any behavior that changes one’s view of oneself. Because complying with an initial foot-in-the-door request leads to a change in self-view, people will comply with the second, larger request even if it comes from a different person (Freedman & Fraser, 1966). In contrast, the effect of agreeing to an initial lowball request is specific to that requestor; if someone else springs the added cost on us and asks if we will still follow through, we tend to walk away from the table (Burger & Petty, 1981). When the two strategies are compared, low-balling often gains greater compliance (Brownstein & Katzev, 1985; Cialdini et al., 1978).

Because the norm of reciprocity is strong, it is often used to induce compliance. If you have ever donated money to an organization after it provided you with a free gift (preprinted address labels, for example), then you have felt the pull of reciprocity. But why do we reciprocate? Is it a built-in instinct, instilled over the course of evolution? Perhaps when someone does us a favor we just like that person more, or we’re simply in a better mood, and these factors make us more likely to reciprocate.

A clever experiment by Regan (1971) gives us some clues to answering these questions. Each participant worked on a task alongside a confederate who came across as either very likeable or downright rude. In one condition, the confederate returned from a break halfway into the study and, as an unexpected favor, gave the participant a can of Coke. In a second condition, the participant also received a Coke, but this time from the experimenter. And in a third condition, the participant did not receive this unexpected gift. At the end of the session, the confederate asked the participant if he would be willing to help him out by purchasing lottery tickets for a fundraiser.

Regan figured that if people help others simply because they like them, then participants in this study would not help the rude confederate, even if he kindly delivered a Coke. Also, if receiving favors increases helping simply because it improves mood, then participants would be more willing to help the confederate if they had been given a free Coke, regardless of whether it came from the confederate or the experimenter. The results did not support either of these hypotheses. Instead, people bought about 75% more tickets when the confederate had given them a Coke compared with the other two conditions, regardless of whether the confederate was generally likeable or rude. This finding suggests that liking or being in a good mood are not essential ingredients of reciprocity. That is, although both positive moods and liking do tend to increase compliance, as you might expect, they were not especially influential in this context (Carlson et al., 1988; Isen et al., 1976). Rather, this experiment shows the power of reciprocity. So even if you despise your neighbor, you might still find yourself agreeing to take care of her pets if she’s been bringing in your trash cans from the street.

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However, reciprocation does have its limits. Simply doing someone a favor generally will not lead the person to comply with your request if you’re requesting something that would violate the person’s moral standards or put the person at risk, such as helping you to cheat on a test (Boster et al., 2001). So although you might take care of Rover from next door to reciprocate your neighbor’s past favors, you may draw the line if he asks you to, say, help him fudge his income tax return.

Norms toward reciprocity can also play a role in negotiations. Conventional wisdom might tell you that when you approach your boss about requesting a raise, you might not want to start with a high initial request that could alienate your superior and stop the process before it starts. But such conventionality might not be so wise, because it ignores the powerful role that reciprocity can play. Although your boss might deny your request for a hefty $10,000 raise, the guilt she might experience from turning down your request could lead her to compromise at a $5,000 raise, which might have been the amount you were hoping for all along. This is called the door-in-the-face effect; it’s the idea that people are more likely to comply with a moderate request after they have first been presented with and refused to agree to a much larger request. (Although this tactic isn’t working for Calvin in the cartoon below, it often does!) The name draws on the nature of door-to-door sales, in which making an unreasonable request might initially get the door slammed in your face but might also open the person to considering a compromise offer.

Consider a classic study that Cialdini carried out with his research team (Cialdini et al., 1975). Members of his team approached students around campus and asked if they would be interested in volunteering their time on an upcoming Saturday chaperoning a group of juvenile delinquents on a trip to the zoo. With no financial incentive and concerns about lacking the experience, 83% of those approached refused. But the experimenters first approached another group of students with the offer of a different kind of volunteer opportunity with the same organization: spending two hours a week for two full years as counselors to delinquent kids. Not surprisingly, no one approached was willing to make this extreme commitment of time. However, when their refusal was followed by a smaller request to chaperone for one Saturday afternoon (the same request initially given to the other group of students), half of the students agreed to help out. In other words, the door-in-the-face strategy actually tripled the number of volunteers!

How is reciprocity involved here? When the person being approached with a request views the smaller compromise offer as a concession, that person can become motivated to reciprocate and do her part to maintain good faith in the exchange. This then can lead her to be more likely to accept the compromise offer. To put it simply, it is as if the person making the requests is doing you a favor by offering you the smaller request.

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This anecdote typifies the powerful effect that social proof has on our behavior. This technique capitalizes on our tendency to conform to what we believe others think and do. It is akin to making salient a descriptive norm but emphasizes the special value of information about what similar and respected others have done. As social comparison theory posits, we often look to similar others to provide us with information about what is good, valuable, and desirable. This makes our friends the most effective salespeople we know, and we commonly follow their recommendations for restaurants, movies, and clothing brands.

If consistency means choosing a behavior that conforms to your perception of yourself, and social proof means choosing a behavior that conforms to what others are doing, you can imagine that in some cases these two compliance strategies could pull a person in opposing directions. In fact, there can be cultural variation in which strategy is more effective. For example, in one study, students from a collectivist culture (Poland) chose to comply with a request on the basis of information about how many of their peers had complied, whereas U.S. students, who are typically more individualistic, were more influenced by considering when they had complied with similar requests in the past (Cialdini et al., 1999).

Some researchers have suggested that our craving for scarce things stems from the psychological process called reactance (Brehm, 1966), which we will discuss in greater detail in our next chapter. When something is hard to get because it’s scarce, we feel that scarcity as an insult to our basic freedom of choice, and that makes us want the object even more. But because things that are in short supply often fetch a higher price, Cialdini (1987) views scarcity as a heuristic that we have learned implicitly because we simply want what is hard to attain without giving it too much thought.

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Yet another approach proposes that things or ideas that are scarce or rare attract our attention and greater scrutiny (Brock & Brannon, 1992). As a result, our evaluations can be polarized by other information, such as strong or weak arguments for wanting the product. If at your local taquería, you are asked if you want a cinnamon twist that’s available for only a limited time, you might comply with this attempt to sell the twists only if you are also given a good reason to do so, rather than being reminded of the fact that these tasty treats aren’t even traditional to Mexican cuisine (Brock & Mazzocco, 2004).

Each of these explanations has some support, and research has not definitively favored one over the other. Regardless of the precise reason for the valuing of what’s scarce, stores and manufacturers realize and exploit this little quirk of human nature. You probably have seen countless advertisements declaring that a good deal won’t last: Limited time offer! Sale ends Saturday! Limited quantity! In fact, sometimes these offers aren’t even genuine. Take the example of a Circuit City store that was going out of business and having a “liquidation sale” for a “limited time.” Instead of lowering the prices on products, the company charged with orchestrating the liquidation of the store’s inventory actually raised prices (Glass, 2009)! Many unsuspecting customers who hadn’t done their homework flocked to the store and bought up electronics for more than they might have paid online or at a different vendor.

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Ellen Langer and her colleagues did a simple study in which a confederate asked if she could cut in line at a photocopy machine (Langer et al., 1978). When the confederate explained her request by saying that she was in a rush, 94% of people agreed to let her go ahead of them, compared with only 60% when the person gave no reason whatever and simply asked to use the copy machine. But the interesting condition was one where the confederate asked to use the copy machine “because I have to make some copies.” On the surface this sounds like a reason and probably activated a schematic impression that the requestor had a good reason, but it was really just a statement of what she planned to do. (Why else would someone use a copy machine?) Yet in a fairly mindless way, a full 93% capitulated with this request. In chapter 6, we introduced the idea that such mindlessness can stunt our creativity and lead us to behave and think in a rather rigid way. As we see here, it can also leave us vulnerable to complying with rather meaningless requests.

Of course, some situations evoke a knee-jerk reaction to say no. When a telemarketer calls during dinner, or a panhandler asks for change, our mindlessly scripted response might be to say no and go on about our business. So in these types of situations, compliance can be increased by breaking people free of their mindless response. For example, would you be more likely to give change to a panhandler who: (a) asks for a quarter or (b) asks for 37 cents? Ask almost any economists, and they would say that a rational person would answer (a), because $.25 is less than $.37. But Santos and colleagues (1994) found that when passersby were asked if they could spare any change, only 44% complied. When they were asked for a quarter, 66% complied. But in a surprise result, when they were asked for 37 cents, 75% of people dug in their pockets to fish out their coins.

Why did this last group comply? Because such a specific request breaks some people out of an automatic tendency to say no while also leading them to think there must be a good reason that the panhandler needs this exact amount. In fact, follow-up studies replicated this effect and found that the 37-cents condition was the only one in which some people asked the panhandler why he needed the money. Furthermore, the especially high compliance rate occurred only among those people who asked why. Interestingly, it didn’t matter whether the reason the panhandler provided was a good one or not (Burger et al., 2007).

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