Chapter 1 - Universiteit Twente

Stage One: Weakening the Ramparts
- that is, the propensity to behave congruently across situations. The next chapter of
this dissertation will address in detail the role of self-regulatory resource depletion in
responding to persuasive heuristics.
General discussion
Four studies tested the first stage of our two-stage model to account for the role of
consumer self-regulatory resource depletion in the effectiveness of sequential request
scripts that are used by professional fundraisers and sales representatives to elicit
compliance. Stage 1 of the model posits that responding to an involving initial request
(be that answering a series of cognitively demanding questions or questions that
prompt self-presentational responses) reduces the supply of self-regulatory resources
within the target. We found that responding to a series of questions (the typical first
step in most multiple request strategies, see Burger, 1999; Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004)
induced a state of self-regulatory resource depletion. Moreover, the effects of yielding to
this initial request were found both in the lab (Experiment 2.4) as well as in a naturalistic
setting outside the laboratory using actual consumers as participants (Experiments
2.1, 2.2, and 2.3). The effects were witnessed on the extent of self-reported levels of
resource depletion (Experiment 2.1), persistence on an unsolvable puzzle (Experiment
2.2, cf. Baumeister et al., 1998), as well as suppressing initial responses on a Stroop task
(Experiment 2.4, cf. Webb & Sheeran, 2003).
Converging evidence was found in two other studies (Fennis et al., 2009, Experiments 1
and 2), one administered in the lab and one in a fieldsetting, which presented participants
with a highly involving initial request, either involving active self-presentation or
demanding cognitive operations. As compared to participants not exposed to an initial
request, these participants showed an impairment in counterargument generation (cf.
Wheeler et al., 2007) and reduced performance on complex reasoning as a measure
of intellectual functioning (cf. Schmeichel et al., 2003). Taken together, the effect sizes
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