Compliance‐Gaining Behavior: A Synthesis and Model*

IT IS A common, if perhaps heuristic, notion in social psychology that all behavior is goal-directed. Restated, this would mean that all action is an attempt by the actor to manipulate his environment to satisfy some desire. In turn, social behavior becomes the manipulation of others to gain the goals of the actor. One need not state the case so inclusively to recognize that throughout life people spend a good deal of time trying to get others to behave in ways they desire. Variations in this kind of behavior may be interpreted as variations in the techniques of gaining compliance. Thus, the techniques may be direct, as when bribes or threats are used to gain compliance, or they may be more subtle, as when "impression management" in the form of appearance or speech is used to make compliance more likely. Regardless of the technique, however, the desire from the actor's standpoint is the same: to control the behavior of another. While most people frequently succeed in controlling others as they desire, success or failure appears to be far from randomly distributed. Rudimentary observation indicates that people differ widely in their general interpersonal effectiveness. In addition, considerable variation may also be observed in the techniques individuals use to gain compliance from others and the situations in which they use these different techniques. If we assume some causal connection between styles of compliance-gaining behavior and effectiveness, the question of why different people use different techniques becomes important. Research and theory in this area, however, are peculiarly scarce. Although social psychologists have maintained continuing interest in the general area of social control, most students have tended to be concerned with why people comply with attempts at control rather than how they, as individuals, go about controlling others. The extensive research with variables such as conformity and persuasibility is generally of this former type.1