Compliance Techniques
This week, you simply need to reflect upon your own experiences as a victim (or user) of compliance techniques. Specifically, you need to find personal examples of THREE different compliance techniques that you have either used to gain compliance in others or that others have used to gain your compliance. As such, you should focus on the foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face, low-ball and/or that's-not-all techniques. For each example, explain which compliance tactic was used, how it was employed and its effectiveness.
If you really want to be daring, you can experiment with your friends and family (or complete strangers) and test the relative effectiveness of each type of compliance tactic. The prediction is that a higher proportion of people will comply with the requests when compliance tactics are used than when a simple request is made.
After sharing your personal examples, answer the following questions:
- What psychological processes underlying the effectiveness of these techniques?
- What are the roles of perceptual contrast and reciprocal concessions for each compliance tactic?
- Which tactic is the most powerful? In other words, which tactic produces the highest level of compliance?