Chapter 1 - Universiteit Twente

General Discussion
interactions, refusal responses typically induce social costs and hence may trigger
active self-presentation concerns (e.g., avoiding embarrassment, Shoemaker, Eichholz,
& Skewes, 2002). Indeed, recent research (Flynn & Lake, 2008) suggests that refusing a
request often costs more than accommodating one, a fact that is often (and ironically)
lost to the agent. We can easily imagine that having to refuse a more moderate,
reasonable initial request is harder and requires more self-regulatory resources than
refusing an absurdly large initial request, and that the former therefore prompts more
effortful impression management concerns. As the present results suggest, this type of
refusal may promote a state of self-regulatory resource depletion, which would explain
the relative effectiveness of the more moderate DITF, a hypothesis that awaits future
testing. Further research could also investigate whether other compliance-gaining
techniques, that do not involve a series of initial requests (such as the fear-then-relief
procedure, Dolinski & Nawrat, 1998), are effective through self-regulatory resource
depletion or other routes.
A last note on the type of requests that were used in the present research refers to
the fact that people in our studies were presented with persuasive requests that were
relatively unsolicited and expected to be received with mild resistance. Future research
might address what would happen when a request elicits an initial positive response.
Will a state of self-regulatory resource depletion in that case still increase the chances
of compliance? We expect that in these instances depletion will still evince an effect on
compliance through the use of a compliance-promoting heuristic.
A point that also receives attention is that low self-regulatory ability that has been
dispositionally instead of situationally determined has also been shown to entail a
larger susceptibility to influence. Future research might explore what other individual
difference variables related to self-control ability could affect persuasion processes.
Preliminary data suggest that people high in self-monitoring (the extent to which
people observe and control their self-presentation and expressive behavior, Snyder,
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