Social Influence and Fleeting Attraction: Generating Compliance through Conversational Pausing

Research on liking behavior in compliance techniques indicates that individuals are more likely to comply with requests from people who generate fleeting attraction through brief, positive interactions. The present set of experiments tests whether conversational pausing after an initial question influences fleeting attraction and subsequent compliance to a request, or instead encourages termination of the interaction. There are two competing hypotheses for the outcome of the present studies that are based on the literature of social influence and conversational analysis. According to social influence, a pause in conversation should increase liking through fleeting attraction toward the requester, and thus should yield greater compliance with the target request. Conversely according to conversational analysis, linguistic politeness norms state that only one individual should speak at a given moment, or else face a sanction for interrupting. The literature suggests that a pause provides a period of no speech for the listener that can allow for the termination of a conversation without violations. Participants of Study 1 were 181 individuals in the student center on a Northeastern Pennsylvania university campus who were asked to check their body mass index. Participants of Study 2 were 40 volunteers from the Fundamentals of Psychology subject pool who were asked to write a critique of a two-page history paper. In both studies, results showed that inserting a pause had no impact on rates of compliance