Compliance Technique: Commitment (DP IB Psychology): Revision Note

Commitment

• Compliance is the act of responding positively to a request or an offer

  • E.g., a request for donations (explicit request) or an advert presenting the latest deal on smartphones (implicit request)

• People are usually aware that they are being asked/targeted to take action (i.e., by donating money/purchasing a product/behaving in a certain way)

  • Compliance techniques are not generally subliminal but they may be subtle and sophisticated

    • There is a reason why compliance techniques are widely and extensively used by salespeople!

• One compliance technique is commitment

• Prior commitment is based on the idea that people are more likely to behave in a particular way if they have already been encouraged to behave in that way

  • E.g., You've already agreed to look after your niece, so you feel that you can't say no to looking after your nephew too

• Prior commitment involves getting active and willing participation from someone who may not have initially set out to behave that way

  • E.g., You had no plans at all to babysit for a whole day yet here you are looking after two young children for 8 hours!

• In essence, prior commitment involves securing an agreement or intention from people to behave in specific ways as determined by the person/business/organisation that has used the compliance technique

  • E.g., Your aunt and uncle knew how to get your commitment to babysit so that they could enjoy a nice day out and escape their children for a while!

The effect of commitment on prosocial behaviour

• Prosocial behaviour is any form of behaviour that is beneficial to another person or to  society as a whole

• The ultimate aim behind encouraging prosocial behaviour is to communicate the core values which the person/group/organisation wishes to promote, which could include:

  • to exercise care and kindness to others

  • to be a responsible citizen, a custodian of the planet

  • to uphold the legal, moral and ethical values (in someone’s home city, country or the world in general)

• Prosocial behaviour may be promoted via several different sources, including:

  • governments (e.g., TV adverts asking people to recycle)

  • schools (e.g., nurturing key prosocial behavioural traits in children)

  • global corporations (e.g., Coca Cola’s ‘Open Happiness’ campaign that put the emphasis on spreading positive ‘vibes’ and prosocial acts rather than on profit) 

• The operationalising of prior commitment in people is a key step towards bringing out prosocial behaviours in them

  • It fosters in people the idea of shared responsibility and a duty of care towards others

Research which supports compliance technique: commitment

Dickerson et al. (1992)

Aim:

• To investigate the extent to which prior commitment is linked to prosocial behaviour.

Participants:

• 80 female students from a college in Santa Cruz, California (USA) 

• The participants were all competitive swimmers

• The sample was obtained via opportunity sampling

Procedure:

• The independent variable involved the following four conditions:

  • Condition 1: Each participant was approached by a female confederate as she was on her way from the swimming pool to the shower block

    • Each participant was given a questionnaire about how much water they used while showering (their water consumption)

  • Condition 2: Each participant was asked to sign a poster which said, ‘Please conserve water. Take shorter showers’

    • The confederate also drew the participants’ attention to water-conservation posters which had been put up around the campus

  • Condition 3:  Each participant answered the questionnaire (as for condition 1) and then signed the poster (as for condition 2)

  • Condition 4: The control condition – participants in this condition were not approached, i.e., there was no manipulation on the part of the researchers 

• A second female confederate then occupied one of the shower cubicles in the shower block

  • She timed the length of each participant’s shower once they had finished speaking to the first confederate 

Results:

• The results per condition were as follows:

• The participants in condition 3 who had made the prior commitment of signing the poster and answering the questionnaire on their use of water spent less time showering than participants in the other three conditions

Conclusion:

• Making a prior commitment to use less water influences the subsequent prosocial behaviour of using less water while showering.

Evaluation of compliance technique: commitment

Strengths

• Understanding how commitment works can be hugely beneficial in a range of prosocial contexts

  • E.g., encouraging recycling/healthy eating/anti-bullying, etc.

• The use of naïve participants in the above study means that the findings are high in ecological validity

  • Naïve participants will not exhibit demand characteristics due to their lack of awareness that they are taking part in a study

  • As far as the participants were concerned, they were simply doing what they always did (e.g., showering after swimming); hence, their behaviour was unforced and natural

Limitations

• It is very difficult to convert people's prosocial intentions or promises into actual prosocial behaviour

  • People may say that from now on they will use fewer plastics but whether or not this is borne out by their behaviour is something that researchers may never know

• Only one confederate timed the length of the showers, which means that:

  • she may have missed the start or the end of the showering sessions; a second confederate should have been used to ensure reliability

Link to concepts

Causality

• Dickerson's study takes place in the field yet it is designed along the lines of a lab experiment (as far as is possible when outside of lab conditions)

• Operationalising the independent variable is not always possible in field experiments, which makes this research quite unique

• The manipulation of the IV using four conditions means that the researchers were able to impose some degree of manipulation over the procedure, which gives the research reliability (plus, it uses a standardised procedure which is replicable)

  • The extent to which this research is fully replicable is, however, limited, as the human variables (approaching the swimmers, timing their showers) can never be matched exactly with each replication

Responsibility

• There are real ethical concerns over the procedure because:

  • the students were not aware that their showering time was being timed (deception)

  • their privacy was breached due to the intimate nature of the way in which the data was obtained (they were essentially being spied on)

  • the participants were not able to give informed consent or be given the right to withdraw