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Volume 4   Number 2     Winter 2010

Positioning and the 'Foot-in-the-Door' Social Influence Technique
Bartosz Zalewski
Warsaw School of Social Psychology

pp. 61-73
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ABSTRACT.  In spite of an ever-increasing number of theoretical publications on positioning phenomena, which describe the processes of negotiating the identity in relations between people, their experimental verification is still lacking. The present article attempts to empirically verify similar negotiations as exemplified by the model of social influence based on positioning theory. Thus, the conceptual replication of Doliński's (2005) research was conducted, with several additional experimental conditions. Findings show that a double activation of the same position results in the highest efficiency of the technique when compared to either the activation of two different positions or the control group. The findings are discussed in the context of self-perception theory. The study demonstrates that positioning can be considered an existing phenomenon, and can be employed in order to enrich the classical theoretical explanations of the effectiveness of the 'foot-in-the-door' technique.

 

Keywords:  social influence, 'foot-in-the-door', positioning, dialogical self, self-perception theory