The Eff ect of a Compliment on Request Compliance under the Door-in-the-Face Technique

The study examines whether a compliment increases compliance with a small request and whether it changes the effectiveness of the door-in-the-face technique. The work considers a compliment as a verbal form of social influence that may affect behavior through positive evaluation, reciprocity, and self-perception. A 2 × 2 field experiment was conducted with 120 students of Novosibirsk State University aged 18–23. The independent variables were the presence or absence of a compliment and the presence or absence of the door-in-the-face procedure. The dependent variable was behavioral compliance with a small prosocial request. The analysis included descriptive statistics, Pearson’s chi-square tests, Cramer’s V, and binary logistic regression. The DITF condition was associated with a higher probability of compliance. The compliment did not show an independent statistically significant effect, and the interaction between compliment and DITF was not significant either. These findings provide a conceptual replication of Cialdini et al.’s door-in-the-face effect in a Russian student sample and suggest that the behavioral role of compliments depends on the communicative context.