The Combined Effect of the Foot-in-the-Door Technique and the “But You Are Free” Technique: An Evaluation on the Selective Sorting of Household Wastes

In a field experiment using the selective sorting of household wastes as the dependant variable, we have tested the combined effect of two techniques that induced compliance to a request: the foot-in-the-door (FITD) technique and the ‘‘but you are free . . .’’ technique. Homeowners were asked to record on a form their entire household wastes for 1 month. In the FITD technique, participants were first asked to respond to a short survey on selective sorting habits. In the ‘‘but you are free . . . ’’ condition, the request for participation included a sentence that stated that the participant was free to accept to participate or not: ‘‘Of course you are free to accept or to refuse.’’ In the combined FITD/ ‘‘you are free . . .’’ condition, the first request was addressed to the participant and the sentence that stated that the participant was free appeared in the second request. In a control condition, the final request was addressed without any mention that the participant was free or not to accept. Results found that the combined FITD/‘‘you are free . . .’’ condition was associated with greater compliance in completing the survey (78.%) than the single FITD (60.0%) and the ‘‘but you are free . . .’’ condition (56.0%), whereas each of these three experimental conditions elicited greater compliance to complete the survey than in the control condition (40.0%). Commitment theory and practical interest of this combined technique for ecology are discussed. Introduction T o gain compliance with a request, many techniques exist in social psychological research literature (see Pratkanis, 2007 for a review). One of the most famous techniques found more than 40 years ago is the foot-in-the-door (FITD) technique (Freedman & Fraser, 1966). This tactic consists of first asking a participant to carry out a small request, which most people readily perform, and then asking him/her to comply with a second larger request, which was the real objective of the requester. The final request was found to be complied with more favorably when it was preceded by a small request than when the final request was directly asked to the participants (control condition). In 1966, Freedman and Fraser convinced 43% of a group of housewives to allow a team of five or six investigators to stay at their homes for 2 hr to make an inventory of all the products used for cleaning and cooking. Three days before this visit, the women were asked to fill out a little questionnaire containing eight questions concerning their consumption. Without this preliminary request, only 22% of the persons accepted the visit of the investigators. This technique of preparing the subject by a small request before submitting the request sought after has been called the FITD technique. Various meta-analyses of numerous studies on this technique have shown its effects on compliance (Beaman et al., 1983; Burger, 1999; Dillard et al., 1984; Fern et al., 1986; Pascual & Guéguen, 2005). It is well known that this technique is particularly effective for influencing people to respond positively to various requests. Most of them are prosocial; examples of such requests are giving someone a dime (Guéguen & FischerLokou, 1999; Harris, 1972), answering a questionnaire (Hornik et al., 1991), and persuading students to take a card designating them as an DOI: 10.1089/eco.2009.0051 a MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. . VOL. 2 NO. 4 . DECEMBER 2010 ECOPSYCHOLOGY 231 organ donor (Carducci et al., 1989). However, the efficiency of FITD technique is not limited to prosocial requests. Dolin and BoothButterfield (1995) found that adult women who were assigned to an FITD treatment during a health fair at a shopping mall agreed more favorably to a request to schedule a gynecological examination. Goldman and Creason (1981) found that the FITD technique remained effective in convincing people to call individuals picked from the telephone directory and ask them to take a survey for the profit of a private organization. Guéguen and Jacob (2008) found that the FITD technique used in a selling context (a footwear store) was associated with greater compliance to the sale suggestion addressed by a seller. The FITD technique is also effective in influencing energy consumption behavior. Katzev and Johnson (1983) have shown that the FITD technique was effective in having people decrease their energy consumption at home. In their experiment, homeowners were asked to curtail their consumption of electricity by 10%. In the FITD condition, this request was preceded by a more moderate request consisting of answering a short energy conservation questionnaire. Three control conditions were performed. In one control condition (CC1), homeowners simply received the questionnaire or simply received the conservation request (CC2), whereas in a third control condition (CC3), participants were never asked to comply to either request. Throughout a 12-week follow-up period, homeowners in the three request groups (FITD, CC1, and CC2) consumed less electricity than homeowners in the third control condition. It was also found that homeowners in the FITD condition consumed less electricity than homeowners in the three other conditions. Thus, these studies show that the effect of the FITD technique is not limited to prosocial requests, and other requests can then be studied to evaluate the sphere of influence of the FITD technique. In the literature, the FITD effect is theoretically explained by the self-perception theory (Freedman & Fraser, 1966). Such a theory assumes that the preliminary request makes participants feel that they are helping other people and caring for others, and once this perception is activated, it favors compliance to the second request. The explanation based on self-perception is perhaps readily explained by the fact that a host of requests tested were prosocial in nature. For some scientists (Cialdini, 2008; Joule, 1987), the effect of the FITD technique is explained with the help of the commitment theory (Kiesler, 1971). When accepting to comply with a first request, an individual is committed to comply with a second later request to act consistently. Another tactic that increases compliance to a request is the ‘‘but you are free . . .’’ technique. This technique is based on the assumption that telling someone verbally that he/she is free to accept or refuse something will lead him/her to comply more favorably to the request. To test the specific influence of the semantic evocation of freedom, Guéguen and Pascual (2000) asked passers-by in a street to give them money. In the experimental condition, their request ended by the phrase ‘‘but you are free to accept or refuse,’’ whereas this phrase was not used in the control condition. They found that 10% of the solicited participants complied with the request in the control condition, whereas 47.5% accepted in the experimental condition. This technique, called by these authors as the ‘‘but you are free . . .’’ technique, leads to increasing compliance with a request, but also to increasing subject involvement. These authors have also found in their experiment that the average amount of donations granted by the subjects was higher in the experimental condition than in the control condition. Thus, this experiment seems to show, empirically, that the hypothetical statement of Joule and Beauvois (1998) saying that using a phrase that states that the participant is free or not to comply is associated with greater compliance with the request. Another experiment showed that the ‘‘. . . but you are free to accept or to refuse’’ technique was effective in leading someone to give money to a prosocial organization (Pascual & Guéguen, 2002). This technique is also effective to gain compliance with a request consisting of visiting a Web site of a humanitarian organization when it is made by e-mail. Guéguen et al. (2002) pointed out a higher compliance rate when the semantic evocation of freedom is included in the message, than when it is not. The above-cited studies show that some semantic aspects of the request have an effect on compliance. Again these results are congruent with the commitment theory. Kiesler and Sakumura (1966) and Kiesler (1971) have made the assumption that the degree of commitment may be manipulated by the degree of perceived choice when performing an act. The semantic evocation of freedom could increase this degree of perceived choice, which in return could increase the compliance to the approached behavior. The FITD technique had something in common with the ‘‘but you are free . . .’’ technique. No pressure or external factors (e.g., incentives) were used to enhance participant’s compliance. Participants were free to accept or refuse each request. In most of the experimental studies conducted with the FITD technique, the request traditionally ended with sentences such as ‘‘it is up to you to see,’’ ‘‘up to you to choose,’’ and ‘‘I don’t want to force you.’’ Thus, it would be interesting to test the association of the ‘‘but you are free’’ sentence and the FITD technique to evaluate if greater compliance would be obtained than when each of the single techniques are used. With the latter technique, using two initial requests rather than one was associated with greater compliance with a later request. Goldman et al. (1981) solicited people by phone to answer a survey GUEGUEN ET AL. 232 ECOPSYCHOLOGY DECEMBER 2010 concerning radio programming, which consisted in keeping track of all the records participants listened to for the next 6 weeks. In the control condition, the request was directly addressed to the participants. In the single FITD condition, participants were first solicited to tell the solicitor the two radio stations that they listened to most often. After responding to this second request, the final request used in the control condition was addressed to the participants. In the double FITD condition, participants were first asked to give the names of the two radio stations that they listen to most often, and after that, the same participants were asked to listen to a one-half-hour radio program and to answer certain questions about it. Finally, after accepting, the final request, which was similar to the request used in the control condition and in the single FITD condition, was addressed to the participants. The single FITD condition was found to elicit more compliance with the final request than in the control condition, but the double FITD procedure elicited greater compliance than the single FITD procedure and the control condition. Thus, given the fact that both the FITD and the ‘‘but you are free . . .’’ techniques are theoretically explained by commitment, we hypothesized that the combination of both techniques would be associated with greater compliance to a request than when using only one technique. Thus, we hypothesized that an FITD technique associated with a ‘‘but you are free . . .’’ sentence would be associated with greater compliance compared with the single FITD condition (H1), the single ‘‘but you are free . . .’’ condition (H2), and the control condition (H3). Given the fact that it has been found that the FITD and the ‘‘but you are free . . .’’ techniques elicited greater compliance, we hypothesized that the single FITD technique (H4) and the ‘‘but you are free . . .’’ technique (H5) would be associated with greater compliance than the control condition.