Low-ball procedure for producing compliance: Commitment then cost.

University of Notre DameJohn A. MillerOhio State UniversityThe low-ball technique, a tactic often used by automobile sales dealers toproduce compliance from customers, was examined in a set of three experi-ments. In all three studies, a requester who induced subjects to make aninitial decision to perform a target behavior and who then made performanceof the behavior more costly obtained greater final compliance than a requesterwho informed subjects of the full costs of the target behavior from the outset.The low-ball phenomenon—that an active preliminary decision to take anaction tends to persevere even after the costs of performing the action havebeen increased—was found to be reliable (Experiment 1), different from thefoot-in-the-door effect (Experiment 2), and effective only when the preliminarydecision was made with a high degree of choice (Experiment 3). In competi-tion with three other conceptual explanations, a formulation based on the con-cept of commitment was seen to best account for the results. An ecologicallyderived strategy for the identification and investigation of research questionswas used and discussed.Social psychologists have recently begun toexamine the effects of a variety of factors onthe likelihood that one person will complywith a request from another (cf. Cialdini &Schroeder, 1976). These investigations havegenerally used a similar epistemological se-quence in attempting to uncover the psycho-logical processes that influence compliancebehavior. Typically, factors likely to affectthe tendency to comply with a request havebeen identified on the basis of existing psy-chological theory. Once selected in this man-ner, the variables are submitted to experi-mental test to determine whether they doinfluence compliance probabilities accordingto prediction.