•How will you manipulate the independent variable? •What kind of request will you make and how will you measure compliance? •How will you recruit research participants and obtain their informed consent? •What will be your cover story •What will you say to research participants during the debriefing?
Have you ever tried to borrow your roommate’s car, sell something at a yard sale, or solicit
a donation to a charitable organization? This is a short list of the attempts to get others to
accede to requests that occur every day. Social psychologists refer to agreeing to a request
as compliance. Not surprisingly, given the prevalence of compliance in everyday life, a great
deal of research has examined the effectiveness of numerous tactics in producing
compliance (Cialdini 2009; Cialdini and Goldstein 2004). One tactic that people seem to find
intuitively compelling is the use of compliments. Yet very little research has evaluated the
impact of compliments on compliance (Grant, Fabrigar, and Lim 2010). Suppose you want
to test the hypothesis that people who are complimented are more likely to agree to a
request than people who are not complimented. How would you test this hypothesis in a
laboratory experiment? As you develop your study design, address each of the following
questions:
•How will you manipulate the independent variable?
•What kind of request will you make and how will you measure compliance?
•How will you recruit research participants and obtain their informed consent?
•What will be your cover story
•What will you say to research participants during the debriefing?
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