The lure technique: replication and refinement in a field setting

Many techniques designed to gain compliance to a request are presented in the social psychological literature. However, the lure technique has received little attention from scientists. This technique, also called bait-and-switch, is used to influence people's choices and involves three stages: (1) individuals are led to make a rewarding decision to carry out a given behavior; (2) they are informed of the impossibility of carrying out this behavior; (3) a new but less rewarding decision is proposed. Only one formal study has been published on this technique, which failed to control two key methodological factors: the status of the participants and the solicitor, and the delay between the initial decision and the target request. These two factors were controlled in this study. Outside a French campus, 40 female students in the 18-22 age range were solicited by a student to participate in a pleasant experiment for which they would be remunerated. One minute after accepting, they were informed that the number of participants was reached, and they were no longer needed. The solicitor then proposed a different task that was less interesting and not remunerated. Greater compliance with the final request was found in the lure condition (70%) than in the control condition (35%) in which the final request was addressed immediately. The results confirm the effectiveness of the lure technique to increase compliance and show that its effectiveness is not dependent on the solicitor's status.