Foot in the Door Technique

This technique states that once someone has agreed to a small request he/she is more likely to comply with a larger request.

The Experiment
A team of psychologists telephoned housewives in California and asked them if they would answer a few questions about the household products they used.  If they agreed, they were then asked 8 questions about soap use.

Getting a small "yes" might gain a bigger "yes"

Three days later, the psychologists called again and this time, they asked if they could send five or six men for a 2-hour inventory of all the products in the house.

The study tested not only two conditions (smaller request and no request before the big request), but four:

• Performance: Researchers asked a small request which was completed and later a bigger one.
• Agree-Only: Researchers asked a small request which was not carried out and later the bigger.
• Familiarization: Researchers familiarized the subjects to the requester (there was no small request) and later they asked for the big request.
• One-contact: Researchers had only one contact, asking for a big request.

Results
The percentage of the respondents who agreed to the bigger request was:

• 52.8%  when they had previously answered the 8-question interview;
• 33.3% after they had consented to answer the questions;
• 27.8% when they were familiar with the requester;
• 22.2% without any prior contact.

We may notice that the participants who fulfilled the small request were more than twice as likely to agree to the 2-hour request than those who were asked only the larger request. Note also that mere increased familiarity was not enough to improve subsequent compliance.

To Remember
Getting a small "yes", could get us a bigger "yes".

Source: Freedman, J. L. & Fraser, S. C. (1966). "Compliance Without Pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, no. 4. Retrieved from http://faculty.babson.edu on November 4, 2013