Guilt and expected guilt in the door-in-the-face technique

Three studies are reported concerning the guilt-based explanation of the door-in-the-face (DITF) technique, which proposes that in successful DITF implementations, first-request refusal generates guilt that is reduced by second-request compliance. An initial experiment confirmed that, consistent with this explanation, rejection of a prosocial request evoked more guilt than did rejection of a nonprosocial request. A second experiment provided further confirmation that request rejection can elicit guilt in the expected ways, but found that second-request compliance did not provide the predicted guilt reduction. A third experiment suggested that second-request compliance may be motivated by the expectation that compliance will reduce guilt.