idea of being responsible for a group of juvenile delinquents of unspe-
cified age for hours in a public place without pay was hardly an inviting
one for these students. As we expected, the great majority (83 percent)
refused. Yet we obtained very different results from a similar sample
of college students who were asked the very same question with one
difference. Before we invited them to serve as unpaid chaperons on the
zoo trip, we asked them for an even larger favor—to spend two hours
per week as a counselor to a juvenile delinquent for a minimum of two
years. It was only after they refused this extreme request, as all did,
that we made the smaller, zoo-trip request. By presenting the zoo trip
as a retreat from our initial request, our success rate increased dramat-
ically. Three times as many of the students approached in this manner
volunteered to serve as zoo chaperons.^10
Be assured that any strategy able to triple the percentage of compli-
ance with a substantial request (from 17 percent to 50 percent in our
experiment) will be frequently employed in a variety of natural settings.
Labor negotiators, for instance, often use the tactic of beginning with
extreme demands that they do not actually expect to win but from
which they can retreat in a series of seeming concessions designed to
draw real concessions from the opposing side. It would appear, then,
that the larger the initial request, the more effective the procedure, since
there would be more room available for illusory concessions. This is
true only up to a point, however. Research conducted at Bar-Ilan Uni-
versity in Israel on the rejection-then-retreat technique shows that if
the first set of demands is so extreme as to be seen as unreasonable, the
tactic backfires.^11 In such cases, the party who has made the extreme
first request is not seen to be bargaining in good faith. Any subsequent
retreat from that wholly unrealistic initial position is not viewed as a
genuine concession and thus is not reciprocated. The truly gifted nego-
tiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated enough to allow
for a series of reciprocal concessions that will yield a desirable final offer
from the opponent, yet is not so outlandish as to be seen as illegitimate
from the start.
It seems that certain of the most successful television producers, such
as Grant Tinker and Gary Marshall, are masters of this art in their nego-
tiations with network censors. In a candid interview with TV Guide
writer Dick Russell, both admitted to “deliberately inserting lines into
scripts that a censor’s sure to ax” so that they could then retreat to the
lines they really wanted included. Marshall appears especially active
in this regard. Consider, for example, the following quotes from Russell’s
article:
30 / Influence