Compliance Gaining Strategies

Conceptualizing Compliance Gaining

As its name suggests, compliance gaining emphasizes a specific outcome: compliance. Its emphasis is not on attitude change, but rather on behavioral conformity. Research on compliance gaining examines various verbal and nonverbal strategies to increase the likelihood of securing another's adherence. Promise of reward and threat of punishment are two of many such strategies. The trajectory of research in this area has emphasized the interpersonal arena, or one-on-one compliance gaining, although other contexts have been studied as well.

Taxonomies and Typologies

Compliance-gaining research dates back to at least 1960, when John French and Bertram Raven identified five bases of power used in social interaction. Reward power involves the ability to confer benefits on others. Coercive power focuses on the ability to inflict punishments or impose penalties on others. Expert power centers on expertise or competence. We tend to comply with people who “know their stuff.” Legitimate power is based on one's official rank or formal standing. Finally, referent power has to do with being admired or respected. A person is more likely to comply with a request from someone she or he reveres.

In the mid-1960s, Gerald Marwell and David Schmidt were among the first to demarcate compliance gaining as a field of study. They identified 16 strategies that they labeled as a deductive taxonomy, meaning that all compliance-gaining efforts could be grouped into one of the 16 categories. In the early 1980s, Richard Wiseman and William Schenck-Hamlin questioned such an a priori scheme, noting that some strategies, such as deceit or hinting, were ignored. Wiseman and Schenck-Hamlin formulated their own inductive taxonomy, which yielded a total of 14 strategies. Frank Boster, James Stiff, and Rodney Reynolds reconciled the disparity in these two schemes by noting that they were complementary and that combining them produced 24 distinct strategies.

Soon after, a proliferation of taxonomies ensued. In the mid-1990s this taxonomic confusion was remedied somewhat by Kathy Kellermann and Tim Cole. They compared 74 different taxonomies and noted that many strategies were overlapping and/or not conceptually distinct. Similar strategies often carried dissimilar labels (e.g., threat and warning), and dissimilar strategies often shared confusingly similar labels (e.g., favor and altruism). After [Page 156]integrating all the strategies, they concluded that 64 separate, distinct strategies had been identified in the literature.

In addition to the patchwork quilt of strategies, compliance-gaining research was problematic on other grounds. First, much of the research was atheoretical in nature. Researchers identified what strategies participants claimed they would use, but not why participants chose those particular strategies. Second, many studies were based on hypothetical checklists. Respondents were presented with hypothetical scenarios, offered a list of potential strategies, and instructed to rate the strategies according to their likelihood of using them. Such an approach risks social desirability bias. On paper, respondents might prefer more positive strategies. In practice, however, they might employ more negative strategies. A third limitation is that many studies measured only strategy preferences, not behavioral compliance. More recent investigations, thankfully, have focused on actual compliance in real-world settings.

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