Acceptability and psychological discomfort: a motivational interpretation of the nose-door effect.

Summary The nose-gate procedure (Cialdini, Vincent, Lewis, Catalan, Wheeler, & Darby, 1975) increases the probability that subjects will accept a target query by confronting them beforehand with a query that is too costly to be accepted. In this work, we propose a motivational interpretation of this effect, according to which the refusal of the extreme request generates a state of tension that the subject will be motivated to reduce by accepting the target request. Interpretations of the nose-gate effect are reviewed, and then six experiments are reported. The results are broadly consistent with the hypotheses.