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By Root 1277 0

daunting, take heart. A classic study in psychology shows that you can start with small steps. In the 1960s, two psychologists from Stanford University, Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser, asked a researcher to go door-to-door in an upscale neighborhood in Palo Alto, California. When home owners answered the door, the researcher announced himself as a volunteer for “Citizens for Safe Driving” and asked whether they would allow a billboard reading “Drive Carefully” to be installed on their lawns. They were shown a photo of the billboard on the lawn of a different house, and it was a real eyesore—crudely constructed and so enormous that it obscured much of the front of the house. The home owners were assured that the sign would make “just a small hole in your lawn.”

No doubt if this volunteer knocked on your door, you’d have a colorful response. And, indeed, 83 percent of the home owners passed on the “opportunity.” But here’s the twist: In a different neighborhood, the researchers used a simple technique that more than quadrupled the number of yesses!

The technique was remarkably subtle: Two weeks earlier, the same home owners had been approached by a volunteer claiming to represent a different driver-safety organization. They were asked to put a tiny “Be a Safe Driver” sign—less than half the size of a postcard—in the window of their car or home. The volunteer said the sign was intended to make citizens more aware of the need to drive carefully. This seemed such a trivial commitment that almost all of the home owners said yes. Their little-yes seemed to pave the way for the big-yes. When the researchers came back two weeks later and asked the home owners to install the eyesore billboard, 76 percent accepted it. Freedman and Fraser called this strategy a “foot in the door” technique. Accepting the tiny driver-safety sign greatly increased the likelihood that the home owners would accept the gigantic driver-safety sign.

Then the results got even stranger. Volunteers approached a third group of home owners with a different request. Rather than being presented with the tiny sign about driving safety, home owners in the third group were asked to sign a petition to “Keep California beautiful.” Hard to oppose that, so again almost everyone complied. Then two weeks later, those petition-signers were approached about hosting the eyesore billboard, and half of them said yes! That’s three times the acceptance rate of the home owners who hadn’t signed the petition.

This result confused even Freedman and Fraser. They hadn’t expected the “Keep California beautiful” petition to be a “foot in the door” for a commitment to driver’s safety. The two domains were completely unrelated. After some reflection, they speculated that the petition signing might have sparked a shift in the home owners’ own sense of identity. Freedman and Fraser wrote, “Once [the home owner] has agreed to the request, his attitude may change, he may become, in his own eyes, the kind of person who does this sort of thing, who agrees to requests made by strangers, who takes action on things he believes in, who cooperates with good causes.”

In a sense, signing the petition became evidence to the home owners that they were “concerned citizens,” and this subtle shift in identity led to a shift in their behavior. Two weeks later, when they were approached with the option to put a billboard on their lawns, they subconsciously asked themselves James March’s three identity questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation? If you consider yourself to be a “fit in with the neighbors person,” you’ll deny the request. If you consider yourself to be an “immaculate lawn person,” you might assault the researcher. But if you’re a newly hatched “concerned citizen,” you’ll find it honorable to host the sign.

6.

Now, let’s be clear: The Freedman-Fraser study is kind of sleazy. We’ll try to separate the sleazy part from the science part.

The sleazy part is the deception. The home owners are being tricked into doing something