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The Door in the Face Technique

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Principle of Persuasion: The door-in-the-face (DITF) technique is a simple, yet effective two-step technique to gaining behavioral compliance from a recipient. This technique works by first making a costly, large initial request that the recipient of the message will most likely decline, and then following up the initial request with a smaller, less costly, and more realistic one (Rodafinos, Vucevic, & Sideridis, 2005). Meanwhile, compliance with the smaller, less costly request is what the user has been aspiring to attain all along. The DITF technique is persuasive and effective in attaining the desired request due to several reasons: First, people are a lot more likely to comply with the second request when it is contrasted against the initial large request. This makes the second request seem a lot smaller than it may actually be and therefore, a lot more reasonable to comply with. Second, DITF is effective due to the norm of reciprocity, which states that people generally feel compelled to return a favor; if one person gives something up, so too should the other. In the door-in-the-face technique, when we give up the larger initial request and figuratively settle for the smaller request, the receiver feels obligated to return the favor and satisfy our request. Furthermore, DITF is effective because in refusing the more costly initial request, the user may experience guilt and emotionally persuade themselves to oblige with the second request to avoid this negative

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