People Refuse Less When Dealing with Abnormal and Charitable-related Request

People Refuse Less When Dealing with Abnormal and Charitable-related Request

Persuasion usually occurs when people are mindless. According to the pique technique, target tend to comply if the mindless state is interrupted by, for example, a abnormal request. In this experiment, we are examining whether making an abnormal or charitable requests can influence people's willingness to donate money. There are two independent variables in this experiment. One of them is the type of request, either normal or abnormal. The other independent variable is the charitable state of the request, such that whether it is a charitable or uncharitable request. The dependent variable that we are measuring is people's willingness to donate money to different type of requests.

A former experiment done by Santos, Leve, and Pratkanis (1994), demonstrated the use the of the pique technique in an experiment where the experimenters pretend to be panhandlers and ask for money by a normal amount (a quarter or any change) or a abnormal amount (17 cents or 37 cents) (p. 577). They found that strange requests have higher percentages of inquires and also higher percentages of compliances. In our experiment, we also make both normal and abnormal requests. For the normal one, we ask for 5 dollars donation, while for the abnormal request, we ask for 20 quarters which also worth 5 dollars but certainly is a strange request to make.

Another experiment done by Davis and Knowles (1999) tested a similar technique which is called the disrupt-then-reframe (DTR) technique (p. 192). DTR technique involves a minor disruption to a request and a direct reframe following (p. 192). A small disruption can be naming the price of a note card as 300 pennies instead of 3 dollars, a...

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...utes to answer them. Therefore, we also have a stopwatch for timing.

Procedure

All the participants will be sitting in the same room. They will be randomly assigned to a group and a specific position. According to each participant's specific position, they will be given a questionnaire on which there are four scenarios and in total of sixteen questions. Different participant's questionnaire has different order of the scenarios and questions. Every participant has ten minutes to answer the questionnaire. If someone finish earlier, they should still keep their eyes on their own questionnaire. During the whole experiment, no talking or discussion is allowed. The experimenter will record the time. After ten minutes, the experimenter will collect the questionnaire. We will locate the likert scale question under each scenario and collect data for statistically analysis.