Does social psychology persist over half a century? A direct replication of Cialdini et al.’s (1975) classic door-in-the-face technique

Abstract

Many failed replications in social psychology have cast doubt on the validity of the field. Most of these replication attempts have focused on findings published from the 1990s on, ignoring a large body of older literature. As some scholars suggest that social psychological findings and theories are limited to a particular time, place, and population, we sought to test whether a classical social psychological finding that was published nearly half a century ago can be successfully replicated in another country on another continent. To this end, we directly replicated Cialdini et al.’s (1975) door-in-the-face (DITF) technique according to which people’s likelihood to comply with a target request increases after having turned down a larger request. Thereby, we put the reciprocal concessions theory – the original process explanation of the DITF technique – to a critical test. Overall, compliance rates in our replication were similarly high as those Cialdini et al. (1975) found 45 years ago. That is, participants were more likely to comply with a target request after turning down an extreme request than participants who were exposed to the target request only or to a similarly small request before being exposed to the target request. These findings support the idea that reciprocity norms play a crucial role in DITF strategies. Moreover, the results suggest that at least some social psychological findings can transcend a particular time, place, and population. Further theoretical implications are discussed.

Manipulating Belief in Free Will and Its Downstream Consequences: A Meta-Analysis

“…Indeed, even though previous investigations suggest that irrespective of culture, most people belief in free will (Sarkissian et al, 2010;Wisniewski et al, 2019), there is an extensive literature showing cross-cultural differences on how individuals construe agency and choice (e.g., Furnham et al, 1994;Markus & Kitayama, 2003). In line with a recent call for cross-cultural replications in social psychology (Genschow et al, 2021), an interesting avenue for future research could therefore be to explore the influence of the manipulation in different continents and cultures. Such research could test not only if there is a different influence of free will belief manipulations on the beliefs themselves but also whether cultural differences moderate the degree to which these manipulations have downstream consequences.…”