Gradually improve the requirements, to achieve the desired purpose

There was an experiment done by a psychologist

Send two college students to visit housewives in suburban California. First, a college student visited a group of housewives and asked them to do a little favor: sign a petition calling for safe driving. This is a public welfare event. I don't know how many people die under the wheel every year! It's just a sign. It's so easy. So most housewives signed the petition cooperatively, and only a few refused on the pretext of "I'm busy".

Two weeks later, another college student was sent to visit the housewives door to door again. However, in addition to the first housewife visited by college students, he also visited another group of housewives. Unlike his last assignment, the college student carried a big sign calling for safe driving, asking housewives to erect it on the lawn of their respective yards. However, this is a big and stupid sign, which is not in harmony with the surrounding environment. According to the general experience, this somewhat excessive request is likely to be rejected by these housewives. After all, this college student has never met them. It's really hard for them to ask for such a big help.

The result is: in the second group of housewives, only 17% accepted the request, but in the first group of housewives, 55% accepted the request, far more than the second group.

In this regard, psychologists explain that people want to give others a consistent good impression. In order to ensure the consistency of this impression, people sometimes do things that are difficult to explain intellectually. In the above experiment, housewives who agreed to the first request showed a willingness to cooperate. When they face the second bigger request, in order to maintain their image of helping others, they can only agree to erect a clumsy and ugly signboard in their own yard.

This experiment tells us that once a person has accepted a small request from others, if others put forward a higher request on this basis, then the person tends to accept a higher request. In this way, the requirements can be raised step by step, and the expected goal can be achieved effectively. In psychology, this is the "threshold effect" we talked about earlier.

Therefore, in interpersonal communication, if you want to change other people's behavior and achieve your own goal, you can first put forward a smaller request. Once the other party agrees, you can put forward the larger request, which will be easily met.