Here, Have a Door-in-the-Face!

Hey all! I feel like I've said this many times before, but sorry for taking so long to update... Things have been really crazy this quarter, but sometimes in a good way. In fact, I started this post at 2:20 AM due to purposely trying to sleep late. I had a Dance Marathon shift from 7:30PM to 5:30 AM tomorrow, so I figured I'd just try sleeping really late and hope I can last through the night haha.

Anyways, the other day my friend Jose got a call from a group called UCLA Student Giving Committee. This group focuses on calling students at UCLA and asking them to make a relatively large monthly donation. If the person refuses, the caller tones down their offer and asks for something much more simple, such as a $20 donation. Hopefully he doesn't mind me posting this, but once the person asked for the donation, he simply told the caller, "Hey, I know what you're doing..." You see, Jose is taking Social Psychology (which is my favorite subject and class at UCLA), and one of the topics the class has covered is basic advertising. The four basic techniques he has covered are the norm of reciprocity, foot-in-the-door (FITD), door-in-the-face (DITF), and low-balling. While all of them are quite significant, with the norm of reciprocity being the most personally interesting to me, we'll focus on DITF since that's the technique used on Jose.

Door-in-the-face works by presenting someone with an exorbitantly large request, and then presenting a small request after the initial request is rejected. For example, let's say that I'm trying to recruit people for a community service project. It's hard to get people to volunteer with a direct request, so many recruiters tend to take advantage of these techniques. So, instead of asking people to volunteer an hour, I ask them to volunteer 10 hours of their day for community service. Of course, this is quite a lot, and it's a request that's not really meant to be accepted. After my initial request is rejected, I ask them if they can just simply spend one hour of their time helping us out instead of ten. Interestingly enough, not only does this technique lead to more people agreeing to help, but also a significantly larger number of people actually show up after committing as compared to just presenting the initial request of an hour.

Why does this work, exactly? It's up for debate, but psychologists tend to agree that it plays on a heuristic known as the anchor and adjustment heuristic. Simply put, heuristics refer to the way that we see and interpret the world, almost like a mental filter or processor. The simplest way to demonstrate this heuristic is to read this:

The Mississippi River is shorter than 3750 miles. How long is the Mississippi River?

Assuming that you, as the reader, don't actually already know the answer to this question, I'd guess you would range somewhere around 3000 miles or so. The Mississippi River is actually 2320 miles long or so, which is probably shorter than what you were expecting. As you may have gathered, the anchor and adjustment heuristic takes the info that was presented previously and uses that as an "anchor" point to which we guide decisions. 3000 miles seems a reasonable guess since I said it's shorter than 3750 miles, as 1500 miles would have seemed reasonable if I said the Mississippi River is longer than 750 miles. Our brain takes this information that we know for sure to be true, or our 'anchor', and uses that as to make a guess for things that we do not know, which is the adjustment.

So, if we go back to the story of Jose, we can see how this works out. The caller from UCLA Student Giving Committee asked for a large monthly request from Jose, which he initially refused. Yet, after that he was asked if he could make a small donation of $20 instead. As I'm sure you can figure out, this large recurring monthly donation was the 'anchor' the caller presented. When Jose refused that and they offered the choice of donating $20, they were hoping the adjustment seemed so large in comparison to the 'anchor' that Jose would be willing to comply, for $20 sounds like chump change compared to having to spend $50 or so every month. Hence, you can see how this is a large request followed by a small request by comparison, illustrating the DITF technique.

It's quite a simple mental trick, but as experiments have shown, it can also be an effective one. Now you, as readers, can hopefully be more aware of some of the tips and tricks used in advertising and recruitment and thus prevent yourself for falling for them. Or, you could always use these techniques on other people now that you know how it works... Of course, that's not something I personally recommend, and Joey and I always joke about this knowledge as the "dark side" of psychology. Nevertheless, hopefully you've become a little bit more aware of some social psychology information and techniques, and I shall be back soon enough posting how the other techniques work (Maybe...).