On Resisting and Yielding to Temptation: A Resource-Depletion Account of the Impact of Social Influence Techniques

Have you visited the city centre of your hometown lately to shop on a Saturday-afternoon? Then the following scenario has a good chance of accurately reflecting what has happened to you then. While chatting with your partner or friend, you spotted a group of representatives for a charity a few yards away and they have spotted you. Your first impulse was to avoid them by circumventing the group. Your attempt failed and before you could blink twice, you were already answering a few harmless questions on what it meant to you to be a responsible citizen and which types of charity you already supported. Then the target request for a (substantial) financial donation to a novel cause was presented. Have you complied? Then you are not alone! Persuasion agents such as fundraisers, sales representatives, advertisers, politicians, and marketers are often stunningly successful in feeding the flame of desire or reducing resistance to influence on the part of the target consumer. A host of social influence techniques can be employed to get people to say yes to an offer they were not planning to yield to in advance (Cialdini & Trost, 1998), and more often than not, these techniques accomplish what they were set out to do. But what is the key mechanism responsible for this effectiveness?

Earlier research has suggested various mechanisms to explain the process of compliance, including principles of consistency and reciprocity. These principles all share one property: they work under the assumption of mindlessness. In this symposium I will discuss results from a series of studies on the origins of mindlessness in influence settings. More in particular, we examined the proposition that many social influence techniques work because they deplete resources, resulting in mindlessness. Under certain conditions, this mindlessness increases the odds of yielding to temptation, especially when the influence setting includes decisional heuristics.