Increasing compliance by legitimizing paltry contributions: When even a penny helps.

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted in a door-to-door charity drive context to examine the effectiveness of a technique for solving the dilemma of small requests. The dilemma of small requests is that while they serve to make a target person's compliance highly likely, they also tend to produce low-level payoffs for the requester. A procedure was developed to avoid the dilemma by legitimizing rather than requesting the delivery of a minimal favor. Thus, it was predicted that a solicitor who implied that a very small favor was acceptable but not necessarily desirable would make it difficult for a target to decline to help and, at the same time, make it unlikely that the target would actually offer a low grade of assistance. In confirmation of this prediction, a door-todoor solicitor for charity was able to increase significantly the frequency of donations while leaving unaffected the size of the donations by adding the sentence, Even a penny will help, to a standard request for funds. Experiment 2 replicated this result and provided evidence for the legitimization-ofsmall-favors explanation of the effect. A growing number of studies have focused on the question of which factors affect a person's willingness to comply with a request. Researchers have investigated the influence of such variables as mood states, both positive (e.g., Isen & Levin, 1972) and negative