Loading...
Better think before agreeing twice. Mere agreement: a similarity-based persuasion mechanism
Pandelaere, Mario Briers, Barbara Dewitte, Siegfried Warlop, Luk
Pandelaere, Mario
Briers, Barbara
Dewitte, Siegfried
Warlop, Luk
Citations
Altmetric:
Publication Type
Journal article with impact factor
Editor
Supervisor
Publication Year
2010
Journal
International Journal of Research in Marketing
Book
Publication Volume
27
Publication Issue
2
Publication Begin page
133
Publication End page
141
Publication NUmber of pages
Collections
Abstract
The present paper shows that the frequency of people's compliance with a request can be substantially increased if the requester first gets them to agree with a series of statements unrelated to the request but selected to induce agreement. We label this effect the ‘mere-agreement effect’ and present a two-step similarity-based mechanism to explain it. Across five studies, we show that induced mere agreement subtly causes respondents to view the presenter of the statements as similar to themselves, which in turn increases the frequency compliance with a request from that same person. We support the similarity explanation by showing that the effect of agreement on compliance is suppressed when agreement is induced to indicate dissimilarity with the interviewer, when the request is made by some other person, and when the artificially high level of agreement is made salient. We also validate the practical relevance of the mere-agreement persuasion technique in a field study. We discuss how the mere-agreement effect can be broadly used as a tool to increase cooperation and be readily implemented in marketing interactions.
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Mere agreement, Similarity, Compliance, Helpfulness, Social influence