Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Today, I thought I’d share a quick review that I received from my friend, Anne, who is a member of my Crazy Thinkers Membership, or as I like to refer to it, the Thinkership. For those who aren’t familiar with what that is, every month in the membership, I’m sending out to my Crazy Thinkers members real-life memes, articles, headlines, etc. and giving them questions that so that they can show these things to their middle & high schoolers and practice recognizing & naming the fallacies they see, and also have deeper conversations. This month, I sent out two separate articles about Covid, both of which were quite fascinating in their messaging. Guys, this is how you actually learn how to think. Yes, learning about the fallacies is important, which is what I do here on the podcast, but practicing recognizing them and having a system for asking good questions is where you actually learn the skill of good thinking. That’s what I give my members every single month. So anyways, back to my friend Anne. She says, “I'm loving the emails and thinker discussions. I'm so glad you are doing this. I am also glad you posted the covid articles. WOW what different viewpoints but the same ugly emotions. I appreciate your follow-up questions and plan to talk to my son about them.” Right now, the doors to the Crazy Thinkers membership is closed, but if you want to get on the waitlist for when we open again next month, just go to filteritthroughabraincell.com/crazy and you can add your name to the waitlist.
I am so burdened for this generation of young men & young ladies who are growing up in the crazy world we seem to have found ourselves to be living in these days. Just know this…if you’ve been wondering if you’re the crazy one, you’re not. Society has embraced so many falsehoods and half-truths; emotionalism and flat-out lies are now accepted as truth and it seems like those who are trying to speak the truth are being told they’re the crazy ones. I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that a really good place to start is by learning the skills of good thinking. You do not have to get fooled by the foolishness that’s all around us! So, thank you for listening, for sharing this podcast with friends because we desperately need a generation who can think well, think clearly and who cares about truth.
Ok, stepping off my soapbox now! Let’s get into today’s episode. Like in the last episode, I’m going to be talking about something that’s more of a control or manipulation technique than a fallacy per se. In fact, today’s technique is the direct opposite of the one I talked about in the last episode, which was Door In The Face. Today, we’re going to talk about the Foot In The Door technique.
The Foot In The Door technique is when someone first makes a small request or offer that you’re sure to accept because then later on, they plan on making a larger request or offer that they really WANT you to accept, but they knew if they started with the large request you’d say no. You can see the manipulation behind this tactic just from the name…The name comes from door to door salesmen who, when the homeowner opened the door, would put his foot in the door so that the person couldn’t close the door in his face! That’s the purpose of the smaller initial ask…to get a small yes in the hopes they can get another larger yes later. The Foot In The Door technique is another Compliance Strategy that assumes that since you’ve already agreed to a small request, you’re probably more likely to agree to a larger request.
Here’s a simple example: Asher’s bedtime is normally 9:30, but he really wants to stay up later so he can keep working on a big Lego build. He knows his Mom won’t let him stay up an hour later, so he just asks for an additional 15 minutes. Mom says yes…yay! So tomorrow night, he asks for an additional 30 minutes, and keeps increasing the time each night to try to get to the full extra hour. Can you see the Foot In The Door technique at play here?
Or how about this one…have you ever been to a store where there’s someone giving out samples? They get a small yes from you when you take the sample, and then they offer you the whole package to purchase.
Or How about when you’re at the mall and you’re walking along and someone stops you and says, can I just ask you a quick question about your water? Well, it’s hard to say no to a ‘quick question’, so you stop and they keep asking one question after another question and the next thing you know, you feel trapped and they’re 10 minutes deep into their sales presentation for a fancy water filter. You, my friend, were the victim of the Foot In The Door technique.
The problem behind this technique is that it’s manipulation, and it’s using human psychology to try to control your behavior. It’s sneaky and it’s tricky and all of us can easily fall for it if we don’t recognize it for what it is and realize we can say ‘no’. Sometimes, we can have the tendency to be people-pleasers where we’re trying to make other people happy so that we can feel good about ourselves, and so we just end up agreeing to and going along with things that we really shouldn’t and probably wouldn’t if we really knew that we were being manipulated. In this case, and in the case of the Door In The Face technique, you have to stop and ask yourself, ‘do I really want this?’ or ‘do I really want to do this?’ And if the answer is ‘no’, you have to have the courage to just tell the truth and say no.
Another example of the Foot In The Door technique is when people ask you to sign a petition for a certain cause. Let’s say someone is asking you to sign a petition to help clean up the river that runs through your town. It sounds like a good idea and the river probably does need to be cleaned up, so you sign the petition, that’s easy and there’s no harm in that. After you sign, they say, “Thank you so much for supporting the Clean River Initiative. I can see that you really care about our town. Would you be willing to make a donation of $50 to help us get this project started?” Ok, can you see how the signature was the first yes. It’s a small, easy request to say yes to. And then they ask for what they really want, which is the money. If they had just started with the money, you probably would have just said no and kept walking, but because you already gave one yes, the chances of you giving another yes goes up.
Rather than giving you a question to ask yourself for this one, I’m going to give you a statement, a truth that you can say to yourself if you ever find yourself in this position: “Just because I said ‘yes’ once doesn’t mean I have to do it again.” *repeat* Alright, that’s it for today. I have one more Compliance Strategy I’ll tell you about in the next episode.
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
