Helping, Self-Attribution, and the Size of an Initial Request

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Abstract
A field experiment was conducted to test whether insufficient justification and prior compliance are sufficient to cause the “foot-in-the-door” phenomenon in helping situations. It was hypothesized that the size of the initial request is also critical, since too large an initial request could cause Ss to feel that they had “done their good deed for the day” and thus inhibit further helping. Seventy-five middle aged male shoppers were first approached by a female confederate (C) who asked either simple (small request) or complicated (large request) directions. Subsequently, a male C dropped a bag of groceries in the path of the S. The measure of helping was whether or not the S assisted the C in picking up the groceries. As predicted, significantly fewer Ss who initially complied with the large request helped the second C.

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