Effects of public and private deviancy on compliance with a request

A confederate requester asked subjects to write letters for an educational campaign after they had completed a battery of tests and received either deviant or nondeviant feedback. Half of the subjects were led to believe that the requester had knowledge of their test performance; the remaining half believed that the confederate did not know their test scores. Within these conditions, some subjects believed that complying with the request would involve future meetings with the requester while others were not led to anticipate any future interaction. As expected, deviants complied more than nondeviants replicating Freedman and Doob's (1968) results; however, neither the secret/known nor the future interaction variations produced effects. Contrary to the prediction that deviants are compliant because they wish to avoid mistreatment, secret deviants complied slightly more than known deviants. Compliance was discussed as instrumental in improving self-image.     

Low-ball and compliance to a request: an application in a field setting

The low-ball refers to a compliance technique in which a demand of someone to agree to a request is followed by telling the person the real cost of the request. The number of people who maintain their first decision is larger than the number in the condition in which the real cost of the request is stated prior to the initial compliance. Researches in this paradigm traditionally included a request addressed by a professor to students but was never tested between strangers. So, an experiment was carried out in which people were solicited to keep a dog (8 kg) on a lead until a male confederate returned from a visit to someone in a hospital. In low-ball condition, the confederate told the subject who agreed to the request that it would take 30 min., whereas in the control condition the confederate gave this information when stating his request. Analysis showed that low-ball technique leads people to maintain their first decision.     

Touch,awareness of touch,and compliance with a request

In certain situations it has been shown that touch has a positive effect on the compliance with a request expressed by a stranger. However, the difference between the effect of touch on request compliance between people who had noticed and those who had not noticed this contact has never been taken into account. In this experiment a female confederate asked 227 women to answer a questionnaire. When asking for their collaboration the forearm was or was not touched for a brief period of 1 to 2 seconds. Analysis showed that touch was associated with significantly higher compliance to the request but no difference was found between subjects who had noticed the tactual contact and subjects who had not noticed.     

The effect of legitimacy of a request and compliance versus noncompliance on the evaluation of others1

Eighty male undergraduates read a supposedly true interaction between two workers in a business firm, in which A made a request of B The status of B relative to A, the legitimacy of the request, and compliance versus noncompliance by B were varied It was found (a) that compliers to legitimate requests and noncompliers to illegitimate requests were liked better than noncompliers to legitimate requests or compliers to illegitimate requests, (b) that noncompliers were seen as more internally controlled than were compliers, and (c) that individuals may respond to an atypical situation by imposing upon it a consistent internal structure Status had little effect The data were regarded as clarifying a previous experiment by Ring (1964) as well as suggesting further research     

An application of the foot in the door technique to organ donation

The extent to which the size of an initial request related to organ donation could be reduced when using the foot-in-the-door technique was investigated. After being asked to comply with an initial request to complete a questionnaire related to organ donation having either 5, 10, 15, or 20 items or not being asked to complete the questionnaire, subjects indicated their willingness to become an organ donor. In addition to replicating earlier research, the results indicated that the original 20-item questionnaire could be reduced to five items without losing its effectiveness to increase willingness to become an organ donor when compared to the no-request condition. The implications of the foot-in-the-door technique for medical volunteering in general and suggestions for future research are also discussed.     

Effects of a favor and liking on compliance

A laboratory experiment was conducted to examine the effects of a favor and of liking on compliance with a request for assistance from a confederate. Liking for the confederate was manipulated, and male subjects then received a soft drink from the confederate, from the experimenter, or received no favor. Compliance with the confederate's request to purchase some raffle tickets was measured, as was liking for the confederate. The results showed that the favor increased liking for the confederate and compliance with his request, but the effect of manipulated liking was weak. Detailed ratings of the confederate as well as correlational data suggested that the relationship between favors and compliance is mediated, not by liking for the favor-doer, but by normative pressure to reciprocate.     

Promising reciprocity: When proposing a favor for a request increases compliance even if the favor is not accepted

ABSTRACT

Research has reported that reciprocity is an important social norm in relationships. In previous studies on reciprocity, participants’ behavior was examined after receiving a favor from someone. In a series of field studies, we examined the effect of a statement that proved that a solicitor was someone who respected this principle. Confederates solicited participants for money or a cigarette in exchange for stamps or money, respectively. It was found that the participants complied more readily with the request in the promised favor condition, but most of them refused to take the promised favor. We conclude that individuals were led to help those who respected the putative norm of reciprocity in their social interaction.     

Utilitarian relevance and face management in the interpretation of ambiguous question/request statements

Often, requests are made in an indirect manner and phrased in such a way that they can also be construed as questions. For example, the sentence “Is there any coffee left?” can be construed either as a question about coffee or as a request for coffee. This article offers a combined test of some key predictions of two approaches to the disambiguation of question/request statements: (1) the face management approach, which gives a prominent role to variables such as status and potential loss of face; and (2) the utilitarian relevance approach, which gives a prominent role to the goals pursued by the speaker at the time he or she issues the statement. Ambiguous question/request statements provide a natural test bed for the latter approach in particular. A board game paradigm is developed to allow for a clean, orthogonal manipulation of all variables. The results wholly support the utilitarian relevance approach and offer new perspectives on the face management approach.     

Increasing compliance with medical examination requests directed to children with autism: effects of a high-probability request procedure

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a high-probability (high-p) request sequence as a means of increasing compliance with medical examination tasks. Participants were children who had been diagnosed with autism and who exhibited noncompliance during general medical examinations. The inclusion of the high-p request sequence effectively increased compliance with medical examination tasks. In addition, the procedure was efficient, could be implemented by parents and medical professionals, and did not involve aversive procedures.     

Speed-accuracy tradeoff in double stimulation: II. Effects on the second response

In the double-stimulation paradigm subjects respond to two successive stimuli. Previous research (Knight & Kantowitz, 1974) showed that a subject's speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) strategy interacted with the interval between the two stimuli to determine response performance to the first stimulus. The present experiment examined the influence of SAT strategy on response performance to the second stimulus. Interest focused on effects of SAT strategy upon the psychological refractory period (PRP) effect. If a single mechanism underlies beth first-and second-response performance (e.g., the PRP effect) in double stimulation, effects of SAT upon the second response should be similar to effects upon the first response. Results showed that the PRP effect appeared only when second-response accuracy was stressed. Under speed emphasis double-stimulation second-response latency never exceeded a single-stimulation baseline. This was analogous to first-response latency effects found by Knight and Kantowitz (1974). Response grouping was strongly influenced by SAT strategy and two response-grouping mechanisms were distinguished. Implications of these and interresponse time data for models of double-stimulation performance are discussed.     

Shared timing variability in eye and finger movements increases with interval duration: Support for a distributed timing system below and above one second

The origins of the ability to produce action at will at the hundreds of millisecond to second range remain poorly understood. A central issue is whether such timing is governed by one mechanism or by several different mechanisms, possibly invoked by different effectors used to perform the timing task. If two effectors invoke similar timing mechanisms, then they should both produce similar variability increase with interval duration (interonset interval) and thus adhere to Weber's law (increasing linearly with the duration of the interval to be timed). Additionally, if both effectors invoke the same timing mechanism, the variability of the effectors should be highly correlated across participants. To test these possibilities, we assessed the behavioural characteristics across fingers and eyes as effectors and compared the timing variability between and within them as a function of the interval to be produced (interresponse interval). Sixty participants produced isochronous intervals from 524 to 1431?ms with their fingers and their eyes. High correlations within each effector indicated consistent performance within participants. Consistent with a single mechanism, temporal variability in both fingers and eyes followed Weber's law, and significant correlations between eye and finger variability were found for several intervals. These results can support neither the single clock nor the multiple clock hypotheses but instead suggest a partially overlapping distributed timing system.     

Effects of face configuration change on shape perception: a new illusion

We report two experiments indicating that varying the configuration of face features changes perception of an oval aperture windowing the face: as the eyes and mouth of a frontal-view face photograph are moved vertically toward face boundaries, the oval appears increasingly clongated, taller, and narrower; when eyes and mouth are moved toward the nose, the oval appears increasingly rounder, shorter, and wider. This shape illusion is maximised when faces appear upright within the oval and major face features (eyes, nose, and mouth) appear in their correct relative locations. These results establish that processing of a face configuration can affect perception of a geometric shape that shares visual space with a face. Whether the illusion is face-specific or a special case of a more general geometric illusion is discussed.     

My face through the looking-glass: the effect of mirror reversal on reflection size estimation

People tend to grossly overestimate the size of their mirror-reflected face. Although this overestimation bias is robust, not much is known about its relationships to self-face perception. In two experiments, we investigated the overestimation bias as a function of the presentation of the own face (left–right reversed – as in a mirror – or nonreversed – as in a photograph), the identity of the seen face, and prior exposure to a real mirror. For this we developed a computerized task requiring size estimations of displayed faces. We replicated the observation that people overestimate the size of their mirror-reflected face and showed that the overestimation can be reduced following a brief mirror exposure. We also found that left–right reversal modulates the overestimation bias, depending on the perceived face’s identity. These data underline the enhanced familiarity of left–right reversed self-faces and the importance of size perception for understanding mirror reflection processing.     

An evaluation of touch on a large request: a field setting

The effect of touch on compliance to a request has traditionally been tested with small solicitation (answer to a small questionnaire, give a dime to a confederate ....). In our experiment a larger request was evaluated. Passersby, 53 men and 67 women, were asked by two confederates to look after a large and very excited dog for 10 minutes because each wanted to go into a pharmacy where animals were prohibited. In half of the cases, subjects were touched during the request. Analysis showed that, when touched, 55% of the subjects agreed with the request whereas 35% only in the no-touch control condition agreed. This finding indicates that touch was positively associated with the subjects' compliance (p<.03).