c. Door in the face – ask people first if they could participate in an experiment that involves them to attend for a whole term. Then if they reject, ask them if they could at least do 1 week then.
d. Low balling – tell people if they participate in the experiment they will receive free goods (chocolate) instantly, but then look into the bag after they say yes and tell them there isn’t anymore, and ask them if they’re still willing to participate.
e. That’s not all – ask people if they are willing to participate, and before they can answer say to them “Oh, I know you must be very busy so I have some chocolates I could offer…”
There are 4 of us, so we split up and each took charge of one compliance technique and asked 10 people.
Confounding Variables:
Friends or other people around them – therefore we are always asking 1 on 1. 2 of us asking 1 person may also cause pressure.
Relationship with people – we’ll not only ask people we know, but also strangers to balance out the chances of them rejecting us because they don’t feel inclined to help us, or accepting because we’re on good terms.
Time – always ask people break time lunch time where people are quite free – if someone was asked just before rushing to a lesson they are more likely to say no immediately or yes just to stop us from bothering them.
Results:
Discussion:
From the results, it seems that all the compliance techniques except for ‘That’s not all” seemed to have any improvement from the control. This could be explained that this probably happens the most in everyone’s life. For example, this always occurs in department stores, Watsons etc when they pretend to make the offer just ‘special’ to you, so in the end you don’t buy into this technique anymore.
Low balling worked just slightly better than the control. The technique working could be explained that people already felt committed the act when they said ‘yes’, to signing up so even without candies people were unlikely to reject. The three no’s were actually people who said no immediately; everyone else stayed committed.
Foot in the door worked just as well as low balling, though not that much better than the control. There was a flaw in our experiment – due to carrying out the experiment late and finishing just before the weekend, we do not have the time period needed (stated by Burger 1999) to then ask someone for a larger request than the first. If this was done maybe more people would’ve said yes instead of no. (We asked for the larger request right after the first smaller initial one.
Door in the face was the best compliance technique used. (I took charge of this one) This could be explained because people feel a sense of ‘reciprocity’ (Cialdini’s theory), that I am making this second request just to accommodate them so they are more inclined to agree taking part in the test. (Only one person rejected me, but I didn’t even get to say the word ‘one term’ to be rejected.) Personally, I think this is also because one term makes one week seem a whole lot less, so people whom would’ve originally thought that 1 week was a lot to ask won’t anymore.
To improve our experiment, we should ask people in the same location, and stick exactly to the script instead of improvising, because different tones were conveyed. Furthermore, we all should probably have done all the compliance techniques instead of having each one of us take charge of one compliance technique. Our appearances and voices for example would probably already have an effect on what people would accept our request or no.
Appendices:
No one was harmed in this experiment. All results were kept confidential and all participants were debriefed after we deceived them.
