Compliance: how you can be persuaded to do things you didn't want to

English: This depiction of the SIFT-3M Model highlights the psychological steps involved in gaining or succumbing to compliance: (1) sensing (2) inferring meaning (3) formatting intent (4) translating intent into action (5) memory (6) motivators (7) musing (8) state and (9) inner and outer worlds. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)There are three ways for you to decide to do something quite dumb, such as joining a scam

1. You are just gullible 
2. You are tricked into it as the other side misrepresented the three variables you need to evaluate the decision
3. You are persuaded by one of the various "compliance techniques"

We will discuss gullibility in a different article (you can read some now). Today, our emphasis is on "compliance", which is basically a way for other people to persuade you to do something you do NOT want to do (at first). 

We all know the feeling when we feel we are set in our opinion and nothing could change our mind. You probably did this when you are a small child: I want this item and I am not leaving without it! But ev
entually your parent(s) convinced you to leave. You have been "persuaded" (or physically removed from the location). 

As you grown up, you learned that stubborn gets you nowhere. You self-taught persuasion techniques and used them on your parents, and your parents use persuasion techniques on you. Later, you use it on just about everybody, and other people will use it on you.

It is when persuasion techniques are used for evil, such as scamming you out of your money, that it becomes significant. Most of us merely go through our lives, not even aware of these techniques either incoming or outgoing. We thought it's just relations. Well, it's not. You need to recognize all the techniques before you can spot them being used on you. 

There generally are five commonly recognized compliance techniques:

1. foot-in-door
2. door-in-face
3. low-ball
4. ingratiation
5. reciprocity

Learn more about compliance techniques.