their lawns. In some ways, their response was the most astounding of
any of the homeowners in the study. Approximately half of these people
consented to the installation of the DRIVE CAREFULLY billboard, even
though the small commitment they had made weeks earlier was not to
driver safety but to an entirely different public-service topic, state
beautification.
At first, even Freedman and Fraser were bewildered by their findings.
Why should the little act of signing a petition supporting state beauti-
fication cause people to be so willing to perform a different and much
larger favor? After considering and discarding other explanations,
Freedman and Fraser came upon one that offered a solution to the
puzzle: Signing the beautification petition changed the view these people
had of themselves. They saw themselves as public-spirited citizens who
acted on their civic principles. When, two weeks later, they were asked
to perform another public service by displaying the DRIVE CAREFULLY
sign, they complied in order to be consistent with their newly formed
self-images. According to Freedman and Fraser,
What may occur is a change in the person’s feelings about getting
involved or taking action. Once he has agreed to a request, his at-
titude 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 co-
operates with good causes.^6
What the Freedman and Fraser findings tell us, then, is to be very
careful about agreeing to trivial requests. Such an agreement can not
only increase our compliance with very similar, much larger re-quests,
it can also make us more willing to perform a variety of larger favors
that are only remotely connected to the little one we did earlier. It’s this
second, general kind of influence concealed within small commitments
that scares me.
It scares me enough that I am rarely willing to sign a petition any-
more, even for a position I support. Such an action has the potential to
influence not only my future behavior but also my self-image in ways
I may not want. And once a person’s self-image is altered, all sorts of
subtle advantages become available to someone who wants to exploit
that new image.
Who among Freedman and Fraser’s homeowners would have thought
that the “volunteer worker” who asked them to sign a state beautifica-
tion petition was really interested in having them display a safe-driving
billboard two weeks later? And who among them could have suspected
that their decision to display the billboard was largely due to the act of
signing the petition? No one, I’d guess. If there were any regrets after
56 / Influence