Foot-in-the-Door Technique
A tactic that aims at getting a party to agree to a large request by having them agree to a modest request first, and then building upon that small agreement to larger agreements justified by that initial trust.
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Origin
Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser at Stanford University coined and experimentally established the technique in a 1966 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Their field experiments in Palo Alto — culminating in the "lawn sign" study, where prior compliance with a small request raised agreement rates from 17% to 76% — gave the old door-to-door sales idiom a rigorous empirical grounding. Robert Cialdini later brought the technique to mass audiences in Influence (1984).
Updated February 22, 2026