Door-in-the-Face technique is a sequential request strategy often used for eliciting compliance by making a very large initial request, which the recipient is sure to turn down, followed by a smaller request. In other words at the start a big request is made which a person is expected to decline. Then a smaller request is made which the person finds difficult to refuse because they think they shouldn’t say “NO” again. The theory is that the initial rejection puts the other person in the mood to be more agreeable. Door in the face is an analogy to a customer slamming a door in the face of a salesperson after an unreasonable offer.
The technique was introduced in the year 1975 by a US social psychologist Robert B Cialdini and several colleagues who performed a field experiment in which students were approached on campus and requested to volunteer to spend two hours a week, for two or more years, as unpaid counselors at a local juvenile detention center. No one agreed to this, but when they were then asked whether they would be willing on just one occasion to escort a group of juveniles from the detention center on a two-hour trip to the zoos, 50 per cent agreed, compared with 17 per cent in the control group who received only the second smaller request.
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