Discuss the Use of Compliance Techniques

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Discuss the use of compliance techniques. Compliance is defined as the modification of behaviour in response to a direct request, even though the person making the request has no power to enforce compliance. Compliance is often crucial in industries such as marketing, advertising and sales, where profits are largely based on compliance of customers. There are a number of named compliance techniques, such as foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face and lowballing, which help improve compliance. The two compliance techniques that will be discussed in this essay are the door-in-the-face and foot-in-the-door techniques. Robert Cialdini was a key researcher who proposed 6 main factors that influenced compliance. These were as follows: reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, liking and consensus. Door-in-the-face is a compliance technique in which a large request is first made, and is then followed by a smaller one. An example of this is when a charity asks for a large donations only to be refused, and then asks for a smaller sum of money, in which most people would comply to the smaller amount, and agree to donate. This technique’s effectiveness is based upon Cialdini’s factor of reciprocity, where the subject feels an obligation to agree to the second request, because the persuader has had to compromise from the initial request. Another possible explanation for door-in-the-face includes the worthy-person hypothesis (Foehl and Goldman, 1983), where guilt is induced by refusing a worthy cause (e.g. studies which have made requests to donate to charity). Cialdini et al (1975) was one of the first lab demonstrations of the door-in-the-face technique. There were three groups of participants, the control group 1, 2 and the experimental group. The experiment was carried out as a field experiment, where participants were university students who were randomly

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