Prosocialness and sequential request compliance techniques: Limits to the foot‐in‐the door and the door‐in‐the‐face?

Although there is agreement that the prosocialness of the target request moderates the effectiveness of the foot‐in‐the‐door and the door‐in‐the‐face, there is controversy regarding the form of that effect. In this paper we report a test of competing explanations of the influence of prosocialness on the effects of the two sequential request techniques. The results indicated that prosocialness did influence compliance, but that it had no demonstrable impact on the operation of either of the sequential request techniques. Effects were also obtained for both of the sequential request techniques. Discussion focuses on reconciliation of these findings with previous summaries of the literature.