Reciprocity and Liking Flashcards
What is compliance behaviour?
Definition of compliance: acquiescent response to a direct request
E.g., clicking on a “Click here!” link, saying yes to a friend who wants to borrow your notes
Request can be explicit or implicit, but target recognizes that he or she is being urged to respond a certain way.
Social psychologists ask about compliance
Which compliance strategies are effective?
Why do these strategies work?
What is the underlying process?
Cialdini’s Principles Underlying Compliance
- Reciprocity
- Liking
- Commitment/consistency
- Authority
- Social Proof
- Scarcity
Goal of Affiliation
- Humans are fundamentally motivated to create and maintain meaningful relationships with others
- Abiding by social norms helps us to achieve this goal
Social Norms
- Implicit or explicit rules a group has for the behaviour of its members
- Members in good standing abide by these rules
Reciprocity Norm
- A rule that obliges us to repay others for what we have received from them
- A strong and pervasive social force in all human cultures (Gouldner, 1960)
- Rooted in our evolutionary history
- It is awkward to turn down favors
Reciprocity Norm
Applies to a large range of behaviours
Examples
- Liking
- Hurting
- Cooperate
- Self-disclosure
- Yield to persuasive appeals
- Making concessions
Reciprocity and compliance tactics
Use of monetary gift along with a request to complete a survey
Free samples
Door-in-the-face technique
That’s Not All technique
Doctors survey study (Berry & Canouse, 1987)
What is more powerful – an incentive or a token?
½ participants received a check for $20 (token)
½ participants received a promise of a $20 check upon completion of survey (incentive)
Coke study (Regan, 1971)
Subjects waiting around for a study to start with another “participant”
Favour (coke) or no favour condition (no coke)
Request (raffle tickets)
What’s more powerful: liking or reciprocity? Coke study (Regan, 1971)
Reciprocity
Liking only made a difference when they didn’t get a coke
DITF tactic Aka Door-in-the-face technique Aka Rejection-then-retreat technique
As for a larger request, one that is sure to be rejected, followed by your target request
It backfires if the first request is too unreasonable
Why does the DITF work?
Reciprocal concessions
Perceptual contrast
Zoo experiment (Cialdini et al., 1975)
Target-request only condition: chaperoning juvenile delinquents for a day at the zoo
DITF condition: large request, then target request
Large request: volunteering 2 hours a week for 2 years
Challenges to reciprocal concessions explanation
• Size of the concession not correlated with compliance
• DITF technique is more effective when requests are prosocial
• Delays between requests produce less compliance
• People feel guilt, and they say yes to relieve guilt
o What a different person makes the second request?
The That’s Not All tactic
Present a product but do not allow a response, then sweeten the deal (add in another product or lower the price)
Why does the TNA technique work?
• Evidence for reciprocal concessions explanation
o Manipulated the extent to which it appeared that the seller was personally negotiating with the participant
Cupcake study (Burger, 1986)
Bake sale with no prices listed
TNA condition: cupcakes are 75 cents each
Wait, it also includes 2 cookies
Control condition: told immediately that cupcakes and cookies sold as a package are 75 cents
Goal of Affiliation and Liking
- Humans are fundamentally motivated to create and maintain meaningful relationships with others
- Abiding by social norms helps us to achieve this goal
- Helping people we like helps us achieve this goal
5 Factors Influencing Liking
- Physical attractiveness
- Similarity
- Praise/ complements
- Familiarity
- Association / conditioning
Advantages of Physical Attractiveness
From book
• People think they are more talented, honest, kind, and intelligent
• Election advantage
• Payed more
• Possible disadvantage when seen as a rival
From class • Tips • Getting ID’ed • Hiring situations • Judicial system • Are more persuasive
Would you comply with someone more if they shared your thumbprint pattern? (Burger et al., 2004)
Study on “personality and biology” Took thumbprints of participant and confederate “Type E” fingerprints Type E was common or uncommon Request: Feedback on English paper
Explain the Study:
Email requests to students to complete a 15-20 minute survey
Same last name as student
Different last name
The role of heuristics
- Heuristic = rule of thumb used to make judgments
* Cues can trigger people to respond to strangers the way they do to friends
Compliments
We like people who praise us
Mere Exposure Experiment
Zajonc, 1968
Showed Chinese characters with high or low frequency for 2 seconds each
Participants told that they represented adjectives
Guess the meaning of the symbols
Results
The more familiar the symbols were, the more positively they perceived the symbol
Mere Exposure Effect
“Familiarity breeds liking”
Replicated for different kinds of stimuli (e.g., nonsense words, faces) and exposures (e.g., subliminal)
Conditioning/Association
Classical conditioning
Example: weather man being blamed for the weather, “don’t kill the messenger”, credit card symbols can make people spend more even when credit cards where not used
Christmas card story
Professor sends out Christmas cards to strangers. He got a lot back and most never even inquired as to the identity of the professor.
This is an example of reciprocation
Sociology and Reciprocation
In Japanese the word for “thank you” means that this will not end
Theorized that all cultures use the principal of reciprocation and it is pervasive in every culture
Might have insured survival
