Guilt Cues Enhance the Door-on-the-Face Technique

Abstract

The door-in-the-face (DITF) technique consists of making a large request with a high probability of rejection and immediately after being rejected, making a second moderate request which subsequently has a higher probability of being accepted than when this later request is directly addressed. In this study, we examined the influence of adding a guilt cue after the rejection of the initial large request. Participants in the street were asked to buy raffle tickets for a humanitarian organization. In the DITF condition, participants were first asked to volunteer to help the organization each weekend during the winter. In the DITF with guilt, after the refusal of the first request, participants received a guilt-ridden argument about people’s altruism. It was reported that more compliance was found in the DITF condition than in the control condition and that more compliance was observed in the DITF + Guilt cue condition than in the traditional DITF condition. These findings supported the assumption that adding a guilt cue after the rejection of the first request increased compliance and suggested that further cues could be examined in the future.