What is this article about?

Some people try to influence others in order to reach their own goals. The field that studies this phenomenon is called the study of compliance-gaining. Researchers, however, have criticized this type of study for being underpowered. This paper describes a theory of production of influential messages, by looking through the perspective of a goal-planning-action (GPA) sequence. This means that, if you want to change the behavior of others, you must plan things ahead. By planning ahead, you can adjust your actions.

In the exchange theory approach to compliance-gaining behavior, two goals are distinguished. The first one is that people need to behave in a certain way to reach their desired outcome. For this, one has to be efficient. The next goal is that they have to consider the costs of different approaches. Goals cans be off primary class or secondary class. Primary goals reflect desires to bring about behavioral change in another person. Secondary goals are be divided into four subgoals:

• Identity goals: These are related to the self-concept. They are internal standards of behavior. They don’t have to overlap with the expectations about how others would behave. These goals derive from one’s moral standards.
• Interaction goals: These goals are associated with social appropriateness. So, that the things the person says and does are not offensive to others.
• Resource goals: These are all about increasing and maintaining valued assets. This can be of relational (emotional support, attention), material (money) and physical (health) value.
• Arousal management goals: People want to maintain a state of arousal within certain boundaries.

Primary goals are more central because they define interpersonal influence situations. Also, there first has to be an awareness of the primary goal before there can be a secondary goal.

What are the experiments in this study?

Experiment 1

For the first study, five versions of a questionnaire were devised and each contained two hypothetical interpersonal influence situations. Each situation contained a description and an example of the fourteen compliance-gaining strategies. For each situation, the participants had to make a judgment as to whether they would or would not use the strategy in that situation. If they would not use the strategy, they had to write down why they didn’t want to use that strategy. The goal of the first study was to prove that people keep their goals in mind while engaging in strategic influence.

Most participants (44%) were concerned with influence goals, 33% with identity goals and only 1% with arousal management goals. The participants explained a lot, which means that they do think about their goals during the use of strategic influence.

Experiment 2

The goal of the second study was to look more at the goal scheme (looking for valid and reliable indices of the goals) and to understand the relationship among goals. A set of sentences regarding goals during interpersonal influence attempts were developed. Participants were asked to recall a situation in which they wanted to change the behavior of another person. That person had to be a good acquaintance. Half of the participants were asked to only take a situation into account in which it was very important that the other person acts exactly as they desired. The other half of the participants had to recall the situation in which they were not really concerned with getting what they wanted. These two groups were also divided in two, because half of them had to recall a situation in which they did succeed to change the behavior while the other half had to recall a situation in which they didn’t succeed in changing the behavior. Then participants were asked to write down their goal(s) in this situation and to write down the dialogue that had taken place between themselves and the other person. After that, the degree of respondents’ concern with the proposed goals was measured. This was done using a questionnaire containing a five-point scale. The data was put together and indices for the different types of goals were found.

Experiment 3

The goal of the third study was to show that goals guide individuals’ planning and actions during interpersonal influence attempts. Influence goals can bring about different behaviors. The goals can also vary in their degree of importance. The greater the importance, the greater the desired efficiency for behavior. The variance of importance will also bring about variation in planning.

Participants got questionnaires about goals and hypothetical situations. They had to write about a moment in which they wanted to change the behavior of others and they had to indicate what effort they put into persuading this person. They also had to try to describe what they exactly had said during the conversation. Researchers had to rate this on logic (what the reason was for trying to change a person’s behavior?), directness (did they explicitly tell the other person to change their behavior?) and positivity (was the message good or bad?). The data showed that important goals led to more planning and logic. When people were afraid to be viewed as negative, they were less direct. When people were concerned about the interaction with others, they showed more directness and planning behaviors. Concerns about a relationship was related to more positive messages.