The present paper shows that people’s compliance with a request can be substantially increased if the requester first gets them to agree with a series of statements unrelated to the request, but selected to induce agreement. We label this effect the ‘mere agreement effect’, and present a...

Four experiments demonstrate a 'statement bias': questions are more often misremembered as statements than vice versa. Experiment 1 suggests that the bias increases with increasing item comprehensibility. This finding rules out that the statement bias is only due to the belief that statements...

We examined whether consumers seek more or less variety when shopping on an empty stomach. The data show that hunger increases variety seeking when consumers make multiple food choices at once. In a first study, participants in the hungry condition selected a more varied flavor set than satiated...

Marketers present compromise food products (e.g. light chips) as a way to reduce consumers' conflict between the short-term desire of wanting a snack and the long-term goal of a healthy body. Policy makers welcome compromise products as a way to fight the obesity epidemic. Compromise products...

Charities often request donations while offering of a near-worthless token, like a key chain, in exchange. Little research has examined whether such 'exchange' requests are met with higher compliance rates than merely asking people to donate. Our studies suggest that in mere donation settings...