Техника "Нога в двери": Психология убеждения и соответствия.

Compliance tactic
1979 album by Russell Morris
Italian deposit guarantee scheme
Foot in the door (FITD) technique is a compliance tactic that aims at getting a person to agree to a large request by having them agree to a modest request first. This technique works by creating a connection between the person asking for a request and the person that is being asked. If a smaller request is granted, then the person who is agreeing feels like they are obligated to keep agreeing to larger requests to stay consistent with the original decision of agreeing. This technique is used in many ways and is a well researched tactic for getting people to comply with requests. The saying is a reference to a door to door salesman who keeps the door from shutting with his foot, giving the customer no choice but to listen to the sales pitch.

In an early study, a team of psychologists telephoned housewives in California and asked if the women would answer a few questions about the household products they used. Three days later, the psychologists called again. This time, they asked if they could send five or six men into the house to go through cupboards and storage places as part of a 2 hour enumeration of household products. The investigators found these women were more than twice as likely to agree to the 2 hour request than a group of housewives asked only the larger request. Numerous experiments have shown that foot in the door tactics work well in persuading people to comply, especially if the request is a pro social request. Research has shown that FITD techniques work over the computer via email, in addition to face to face requests.

The Foot in The Door Technique (FITD) was first coined by Johnathan Freedman and Scott Fraser of Stanford University in 1966, when they conducted a study to try and prove this theory of granting smaller requests can lead to agreeing to larger requests. Their findings supported what they had thought was to be true. In an experiment, subjects were initially asked to have signs in their windows to promote recycling along with varying amounts of incentives ($0, $1, $3) for doing so. This condition along with the FITD technique increased the compliance of the participants. These are two extensions to the foot in the door technique that help increase compliance in participants. These techniques can be used in the political, commerce and public awareness environments. For example, a study showed that having a questionnaire about organ donation increased the willingness of participants to become organ donors. It was found that increasing the number of items in the questionnaire did not necessarily affect the compliance to becoming a donor, that is, having a questionnaire alone was enough to increase the compliance. which found that students' compliance to an initial, neutral and small request not only increased their willingness to comply with a subsequent larger and anxiety producing request, but also indicated that the anxiety producing request was deemed less anxiety producing than did the control group, has very large implication for possible online uses of the FITD technique. With the privacy and anonymity provided by the internet, the technique could be used online to gather information about anxiety producing incidents in a manner that would not produce as much anxiety as in person questioning would. Further research in this domain is needed.

There are a number of studies concerning the foot in the door technique and charitable donations. For example, Schwarzwald, Bizman, and Raz (1983) investigated the effectiveness of the FITD technique for door to door fundraising. In their study, some of the participants were first asked to sign a petition before being asked to make a donation to the organization (foot in the door condition). Others were not asked to sign a petition before making a donation (control condition). The request to sign a petition was made two weeks prior to the request to make a donation. They found that a greater percentage of people made a donation in the foot in the door condition than in the control condition. Also, they found that making the small request to sign a petition resulted in more money being donated than not making this request. The findings from scientific studies on the foot in the door technique have been mixed. Although some studies have found that the FITD technique can increase donations, other studies found no statistically significant effect for the technique on donations. A study conducted in 1989 by the Indiana University Southeast and California State University showed that people were more willing to become organ donors after completing a questionnaire about donating organs. It did not matter whether the survey had 5 or 20 questions, it is proven to be just as successful. This survey was conducted with young college students, and the scholars mentioned doing another study with older, less educated individuals to further support these findings and to broaden the population.

With all the research supporting that the Foot In The Door Technique is a successful compliance technique, there is a big question as to why humans tend to follow this pattern. The most well known theory explaining the reasoning behind this is the self perception theory. When a person has originally agreed to something, they will ask a question to themselves about why they agreed to these questions and when they come to the decision that it was truly their desire and nothing else influenced the answer, they will feel the need to stay consistent with their decision and will agree to a larger request. The self perception theory was developed by Daryl Bem, a social psychologist and retired professor from Cornell University, and claims two things: One is that people come to their beliefs and attitudes based on what they enjoy doing and if there is a positive or negative outcome on an experience. The second is that when people do not enjoy something, there is no reasonable explanation of why they would take an interest in it. This theory is the most well known for explaining self knowledge.

In the foot in the door (FITD) technique smaller requests are asked in order to gain compliance with larger requests, while door in the face (DITF) works in the opposite direction, where larger requests are asked, with the expectation that it will be rejected, in order to gain compliance for smaller requests. An alternative postulated by Dolinski (2011) is the foot in the face (FITF) technique: compliance is greater when a second request of similar difficulty is made immediately after the first is rejected, or after a time lapse of two or three days if the first request is accepted. Researchers found between 63% and 68% compliance rates when using the FITF technique, while traditional techniques showed lower rates of around 50%.