and laid waste. We laughed about our strange pattern of seeing each other only once a year at the same time, in the same place, while doing the same thing. Later that day, I mentioned the coincidence to a friend who, it turned out, had once worked in the toy business.
'No coincidence,' he said knowingly.
'What do you mean, 'No coincidence'?'
'Look,' he said, 'let me ask you a couple of questions about the road-race set you bought this year. First, did you promise your son that he'd get one for Christmas?'
'Well, yes, I did. Christopher had seen a bunch of ads for them on the Saturday morning cartoon shows and said that was what he wanted for Christmas. I saw a couple of the ads myself and it looked like fun, so I said okay.'
'Strike one,' he announced. 'Now for my second question. When you went to buy one, did you find all the stores sold out?'
'That's right, I did! The stores said they'd ordered some but didn't know when they'd get any more in. So I had to buy Christopher some other toys to make up for the road-race set. But how did you know?'
'Strike two,' he said. 'Just let me ask one more question. Didn't this same sort of thing happen the year before with the robot toy?'
'Wait a minute... you're right. That's just what happened. This is incredible. How did you know?'
'No psychic powers; I just happen to know how several of the big toy companies jack up their January and February sales. They start prior to Christmas with attractive TV ads for certain special toys. The kids, naturally, want what they see and extract Christmas promises for these items from their parents. Now here's where the genius of the companies' plan comes in: They
'Where,' I said, beginning to seethe now, 'they meet other parents they haven't seen for a year, falling for the same trick, right?'
'Right. Uh, where are you going?'
'I'm going to take that road-race set right back to the store.' I was so angry I was nearly shouting.
'Wait. Think for a minute first. Why did you buy it this morning?'
'Because I didn't want to let Christopher down and because I wanted to teach him that promises are to be lived up to.'
'Well, has any of that changed? Look, if you take his toy away now, he won't understand why. He'll just know that his father broke a promise to him. Is that what you want?'
'No,' I said, sighing, 'I guess not. So, you're telling me that they doubled their profit on me for the past two years, and I never even knew it; and now that I do, I'm still trapped—by my own words. So, what you're really telling me is, 'Strike three.''
He nodded, 'And you're out.'
COMMITMENT IS THE KEY
Once we realize that the power of consistency is formidable in directing human action, an important practical question immediately arises: How is that force engaged? What produces the
As we've already seen, social psychologists are not the only ones who understand the connection between commitment and consistency. Commitment strategies are aimed at us by compliance professionals of nearly every sort. Each of the strategies is intended to get us to take some action or make some statement that will trap us into later compliance through consistency pressures. Procedures designed to create commitment take various forms. Some are fairly straightforward; others are among the most subtle compliance tactics we will encounter.
For instance, suppose you wanted to increase the number of people in your area who would agree to go door-to-door collecting donations for your favorite charity. You would be wise to study the approach taken by social psychologist Steven J. Sherman. He simply called a sample of Bloomington, Indiana, residents as part of a survey he was taking and asked them to predict what they would say if asked to spend three hours collecting money for the American Cancer Society. Of course, not wanting to seem uncharitable to the survey taker or to themselves, many of these people said that they would volunteer. The consequence of this sly commitment procedure was a 700 percent increase in volunteers when, a few days later, a representative of the American Cancer Society did call and ask for neighborhood canvassers.
Using the same strategy, but this time asking Columbus, Ohio, residents to predict whether they would vote on Election Day, a team of researchers led by Anthony Greenwald were able to increase significantly the turnout in a U.S. presidential election among those called.
Perhaps an even more crafty commitment technique has been developed recently by telephone solicitors for charity. Have you noticed that callers asking you to contribute to some cause or another these days seem to begin things by inquiring about your current health and well-being? 'Hello Mr./Ms. Targetperson,' they say. 'How are you feeling this evening?' Or, 'How are you doing today?' The caller's intent with this sort of introduction is not merely to seem friendly and caring. It is to get you to respond—as you normally do to such polite, superficial inquiries—with a polite, superficial comment of your own: 'Just fine' or 'Real good' or 'I'm doing great, thanks.' Once you have publicly stated that all is well, it becomes much easier for the solicitor to corner you into aiding those for whom all is not well: 'I'm glad to hear that, because I'm calling to ask if you'd be willing to make a donation to help out the unfortunate victims of...'
The theory behind this tactic is that people who have just asserted that they are doing/feeling fine—even as a routine part of a sociable exchange—will consequently find it awkward to appear stingy in the context of their own admittedly favored circumstances. If all this sounds a bit farfetched, consider the findings of consumer researcher Daniel Howard, who put the theory to test. Dallas, Texas, residents were called on the phone and asked if they would agree to allow a representative of the Hunger Relief Committee to come to their homes to sell them cookies, the proceeds from which would be used to supply meals for the needy. When tried alone, that request (labeled the 'standard solicitation approach') produced only 18 percent agreement. However, if the caller initially asked, 'How are you feeling this evening?' and waited for a reply before proceeding to the standard approach, several noteworthy things happened. First, of the 120 individuals called, most (108) gave the customary favorable reply ('Good,' 'Fine,' 'Real well,' etc.). Second, 32 percent of the people who got the 'How are you feeling tonight' question agreed to receive the cookie seller at their homes, nearly twice the success rate of the standard solicitation approach. Third, true to the consistency principle, almost everyone who agreed to such a visit did, in fact, make a cookie purchase when contacted at home (89 percent).
To make sure that this tactic doesn't generate its successes simply because a solicitor who uses it seems more concerned and courteous than one who doesn't use it, Howard conducted another study. This time callers began either with the question 'How are you feeling this evening?' (and waited for a response before proceeding) or with the statement 'I hope you are feeling well this evening' and then proceeded to the standard solicitation approach. Despite the fact that the caller started each type of interaction with a warm and friendly comment, the 'How are you feeling' technique was, by far, superior to its rival (33 percent vs. 15 percent compliance), because it alone drew an exploitable public commitment from its targets. Note that the commitment was able to get twice as much compliance from those targets even though at the time it occurred it must have seemed to them an altogether inconsequential reply to an altogether superficial question—yet another fine example of social jujitsu at work.
The question of what makes a commitment effective has a number of answers. A variety of factors affect the ability of a commitment to constrain our future behavior. One large-scale program designed to produce compliance illustrates nicely how several of the factors work. The remarkable thing about this program is that it was systematically employing these factors decades ago, well before scientific research had identified them.
During the Korean War, many captured American soldiers found themselves in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps
