Influence_ The Psychology of Persuasion

I can admit it freely now. All my life I’ve been a patsy. For as long as I

can recall, I’ve been an easy mark for the pitches of peddlers, fund-

raisers, and operators of one sort or another. True, only some of these

people have had dishonorable motives. The others—representatives of

certain charitable agencies, for instance—have had the best of intentions.

No matter. With personally disquieting frequency, I have always found

myself in possession of unwanted magazine subscriptions or tickets to

the sanitation workers’ ball. Probably this long-standing status as

sucker accounts for my interest in the study of compliance: Just what

are the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person? And

which techniques most effectively use these factors to bring about such

compliance? I wondered why it is that a request stated in a certain way

will be rejected, while a request that asks for the same favor in a slightly

different fashion will be successful.

So in my role as an experimental social psychologist, I began to do

research into the psychology of compliance. At first the research