Blog #8-That's-Not-All Technique

One of the techniques used to influence people to comply is the that's-not-all technique. Burger (1986) studied this technique, or the idea that compliance increases when the person influencing someone makes a large request before asking for what they really want, by selling cupcakes to customers. Specifically, in one condition he sold the cupcakes for 75 cents, and in the other condition he told customers that the cupcakes were a dollar but had just been reduced to 75 cents. In his experiment, the same cupcakes for the same price in the second condition sold more than those in the first condition (sales increased from 44 to 73 percent). Burger (1986) demonstrated that the larger first request (dollar cupcake) makes the second request (75 cent cupcake) look smaller than it actually is.

As soon as I read about this in the text, I thought of the days when I was little and lots of my family would get together, spring clean their houses, and have one large garage sell. The night before we would set everything up and label everything with colored price tags (each family within the family would have their own color). I use to think it was so funny that on some of the large furniture items (like couches, beds, or dressers) they would tape the price on, mark it out with a large red marker, and write a new price on the bottom. When I asked my mom about it, she said that it would make people think that they were getting a deal. I thought that it was interesting that my mom, who has never taken psychology, demonstrated the that's-not-all technique without even realizing it!

Burger, J. M. (1986). Increasing compliance by improving the deal: The that's-not-all technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 277-283.