No abstract

Several researchers have shown that odors affect human behavior. However, odors have not been studied in the context of specific compliance without pressure. Specifically, the impact of the odor worn by a requester during the foot-in-the-door procedure has not been documented. To address this issue, an experiment was carried out in an ecological setting. Using the foot-in-the-door procedure, a well-known technique for increasing the likelihood that a person will comply with one's request, the requester was perfumed with vanilla, camphor, or nothing. The results show a strong effect of the foot-in-the-door technique when the requester was perfumed with vanilla and no effect of the procedure when the requester was perfumed with camphor. These results are incompatible with the main theoretical interpretations of foot-in-the-door phenomena: self-perception and commitment theories.

A study was designed to examine the effect of the appearance of the requester within one of the variants of the foot-in-the-door paradigm, that is, the foot-in-the-door with implicit demand described by Uranowitz in 1975. A confederate (Black vs. Blanc vs. Beur2) approached the participant in a park and presented a small request. Three steps further, the confederate "accidentally" dropped 30 sheets of paper. Whether or not the participant helped the confederate in retrieving the dropped pamphlets was recorded as the implicit dependent variable. The foot-in-the-door effect was observed solely when the requester was Blanc. This result shows that the foot-in-the-door effect is not as strong as the literature suggests and undermines the usual interpretations of the foot-in-the-door effect in terms of self-perception and commitment.

We revisited the well-known warm–cold paradigm in a 2 (cold vs. warm) × 2 (odor vs. no odor information) between-subjects experiment. The participants were read a list of character qualities describing a target (cold vs. warm and odor vs. no odor information) before judging the target on 4 dimensions related to social desirability. The results reinforce the warm– cold dimensions as central traits. However, they also go one step further. They show that describing the target as smelling like vanilla undermined the classical cold effect. When forming impressions about the target, the individual can also take external cues (such as the odor evoked) into account.

Initiated by Davis and Knowles (1999), the-disrupt-then-reframe technique is based on the linking of two moments in time. First of all, slipping an unexpected element into a communication situation that is likely to provoke a disruption in communication. Once this disruption has been achieved, proposing a target behaviour by insisting on the benefi t that the individual could derive from it. We wanted to verify that this technique, eff ective in American, Dutch, and Polish contexts and naturally dependent on the culture of individuals and the communication norms which prevail there, could be eff ective in a French context. In accordance with the literature, our results show that when the two phases of the technique are linked, a greater persuasive eff ect is observed. A theoretically interesting way to interpret the eff ectiveness of the technique is proposed.