Compliance
...group concerned with reducing traffic accidents in the community and asked the homeowners if a large and unattractive “Drive Carefully” sign could be placed on their front lawn. Approximately 17 percent of the people approached in this way complied with the request. In foot-in-the-door condition, homeowners were first asked only to sign a petition urging their legislators to work towards decreasing the number of accidents in the community. Several weeks later, a different experimenter asked these same people to place the “Drive Carefully” sign on their lawn. In this case, 55 percent of the people complied. Subsequently research has confirmed the compliance-inducing effect of preceding a large request with a smaller one. Why should this be so? First, people are usually far more likely to comply with a request whose cost in time, money, effort or inconvenience is low rather than high. Second, complying with a small request makes people think of themselves as being committed to the cause or issue. This occurs through the self-perception and cognitive dissonance processes discussed. For example, in the study just described, subjects might think something like, “If I signed this petition, I must care enough about traffic safety to do something about it.” Compliance with the higher-cost request was thus increased because doing so was consistent with these people’s self-perceptions and past actions. People take advantage of the foot-in-the-door technique all the time. For example, some companies first ask prospective customers to respond to a mail survey about their product and then ask to is it to explain how it works. Only then is the customer asked to buy the products. In some cases, the initial request req...