Requests, Requests
We can all remember a time when we had to try our best to convince someone of a request. As a youth environmental activist and president of Students Advocating for a Greener Environment (SAGE) in my home state of Indiana, I certainly had to put these strategies to use. SAGE is the environmental club at my local high school that aims to educate students, faculty, and administration about sustainability-related issues. One of those issues was waste management, and our school was definitely lacking in that department. I was stunned by the volume of trash generated by the cafeteria on a daily basis, so I decided to make it my mission to convince the school to start a composting program.
To be completely transparent, my school’s administration was not the most inviting and certainly didn’t seem to have sustainability on their priority list. As a result, I knew I needed to be intentional with the way I presented my arguments. I used what social psychology calls the foot-in-the-door technique to get the school board to agree to incrementally larger and more impactful projects with the hope of eventually sustaining a composting initiative.
First, I asked if we could run a waste audit in order to collect some data to see if a composting program would even be worth implementation. After getting support for the audit, I requested permission to do a “pilot” program to test composting with a select few classes. Eventually, success of both of these smaller projects led to the school’s approval of a launch date for a composting program!
While I was ecstatic upon hearing the school board’s words of approval and am still grateful for their support today, I couldn’t help but think about how far we would’ve gotten had we demanded a composting program up front. My guess is the project would’ve been dismissed as unrealistic and too complicated. To me, this demonstrates the power of using a series of smaller requests to make a larger request seem more feasible. Thanks social psychology!
What are times that you have used the foot-in-the-door technique?
Click here to see the composting program’s feature in a short film!
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