allows a man to buy her drinks, she is immediately judged (by both
men and women) as more sexually available to him.^9
RECIPROCAL CONCESSIONS
There is a second way to employ the reciprocity rule to get someone to
comply with a request. It is more subtle than the direct route of
providing that person with a favor and then asking for one in return;
yet in some ways it is more devastatingly effective than the straightfor-
ward approach. A personal experience I had a few years ago gave me
firsthand evidence of just how well this compliance technique works.
I was walking down the street when I was approached by an eleven-
or twelve-year-old boy. He introduced himself and said that he was
selling tickets to the annual Boy Scouts circus to be held on the upcoming
Saturday night. He asked if I wished to buy any at five dollars apiece.
Since one of the last places I wanted to spend Saturday evening was
with the Boy Scouts, I declined. “Well,” he said, “if you don’t want to
buy any tickets, how about buying some of our big chocolate bars?
They’re only a dollar each.” I bought a couple and, right away, realized
that something noteworthy had happened. I knew that to be the case
because: (a) I do not like chocolate bars; (b) I do like dollars; (c) I was
standing there with two of his chocolate bars; and (d) he was walking
away with two of my dollars.
To try to understand precisely what had happened, I went to my office
and called a meeting of my research assistants. In discussing the situ-
ation, we began to see how the reciprocity rule was implicated in my
compliance with the request to buy the candy bars. The general rule
says that a person who acts in a certain way toward us is entitled to a
similar return action. We have already seen that one consequence of
the rule is an obligation to repay favors we have received. Another
consequence of the rule, however, is an obligation to make a concession
to someone who has made a concession to us. As my research group
thought about it, we realized that was exactly the position the Boy Scout
had put me in. His request that I purchase some one-dollar chocolate
bars had been put in the form of a concession on his part; it was
presented as a retreat from his request that I buy some five-dollar tickets.
If I were to live up to the dictates of the reciprocation rule, there had to
be a concession on my part. As we have seen, there was such a conces-
sion: I changed from noncompliant to compliant when he changed from
a larger to a smaller request, even though I was not really interested in
either of the things he offered.
It was a classic example of how a weapon of automatic influence can
infuse a compliance request with its power. I had been moved to buy
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 27