What Is Compliance?
In psychology, compliance refers to changing one’s behavior at the request or direction of another person.
Compliance involves changing your behavior because someone asked you to do so.
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While you may have had the option to refuse the request, you chose to comply.
It is important to distinguish between compliance and acceptance.
Compliance involves changing a behavior in public, but not necessarily in private.
While you might modify your behavior, it does not mean that you necessarily agree with it.
There are many different situations where compliance comes into play.
Some examples include:
Sometimes compliance can involve a direct request.
Someone asks you specifically to do something, and you do it.
In other cases, the request may be more subtle and even insidious.
Recap
Compliance is defined as changing behavior in response to a request.
Such requestions can be direct, but they can also involve more indirect forms of social influence.
Marketers often rely on a number of different strategies to obtain compliance from consumers.
The following are just a few common techniques they might use.
The “Door-in-the-Face” Technique
In this approach, marketers start by asking for a large commitment.
When the other person refuses, they then make a smaller and more reasonable request.
After refusing the first offer, you might feel compelled to comply with their second appeal.
For example, your coworker asks if you fill in for them for a day.
The goal is to make the offer as appealing as possible.
We have been socialized to believe that if people extend kindness to us, we should return the favor.
Even though the shocks were not real, the participants genuinely believed that they shocked the other person.
The experiment demonstrated how people would comply with the expectations that come from particular social roles.
Several well-known psychology experiments have explored some of the conditions in which compliance occurs.
Such experiments include Asch’s line experiments, Milgram’s obedience experiments, and the Stanford prison experiment.
Key Factors Affecting Compliance
Several essential factors influence compliance.
The presence of these factors makes it more likely that people will comply.
APA Dictionary of Psychology.Compliance.
A minority of one against a unanimous majority.Psychological Monographs: General and Applied.
