"Door in the face"

One of my all-time favorite cartoons was the "Calvin and Hobbes" cartoon, by Bill Watterson.  The comic ran every day (almost) from November 18, 1985 through December 31, 1995.  I never knew that the character "Calvin" was named after the 16th century theologian and philosopher, John Calvin, while his stuffed tiger "Hobbes" (who appeared to come to life whenever Calvin was around) was named after the 17th century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes.  All very interesting - but what is the point of showing the cartoon above?

I came across this cartoon one day on Twitter (I "follow" the official "Calvin and Hobbes" Twitter feed).  Calvin appears to be using a form of "reverse psychology" here - he asks his mother for permission for two really outrageous (and dangerous) acts that no mother in her right state of mind would ever let a six year-old do.  He follows these two outlandish requests with a very simple one - "Can I have a cookie?"  If we could read Calvin's mind, he's probably thinking to himself, "If she says 'no' twice, maybe she will say 'yes' just once."). 

Calvin is using something here called the "door in the face"technique.  The essence of this technique is to get a person to agree to a simple request by first making a much larger request that the person will most likely turn down (the metaphor of "slamming the door in the face" is where this technique gets its name).  The classic description of this technique was published in 1975 by Robert Cialdini and his team in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  Cialdini divided his study subjects (which, as most psychology studies  do, were undergraduate college students) into 3 groups.  Group 1 subjects were first asked to volunteer to counsel juvenile delinquents for 2 hours every week for two years.  As expected, the majority of subjects in group 1 refused this task.  Following this initial request, subjects were asked to chaperone juvenile delinquents on a one-day trip to the local zoo.  Group 2 subjects were asked the smaller (zoo) request only.  The research team described the initial large request (counseling 2 hours per week for 2 years) to the subjects in Group 3, but they only asked the subjects to agree to the smaller (zoo) request.  While only 17% of Group 2 subjects agreed to the request (slightly more, 25% of subjects, agreed to the request in Group 3), almost half of the subjects in Group 1 agreed to the request, consistent with the "door in the face" technique.

Since this initial description, there have been a number of studies demonstrating the "door in the face" technique.  There is a slightly similar technique, called the "foot in the door" technique, which we will describe in a future post.  I have found a number of books on negotiation that suggest using the "door in the face" technique, albeit under carefully planned and controlled circumstances.  Personally, I have never used this technique.  Obviously it did not work for Calvin, but I suspect that there will be opportunities in the future where I can try this technique, so consider yourself warned!