Social Influence & Persuasion Tactics

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Abstractions about how requests, stances and commitments shape attitudes and action, covering sequential persuasion techniques (door-in-the-face, sequential compliance), the Ben Franklin effect, rhetorical and imaginative stances (accismus, suspension of disbelief), and aims meeting resistance or conviction, as in narrative conflict and the ethic of ultimate ends.

7 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Accismus — Accismus is a recurring rhetoric, social behavior identity in which a speaker or actor feigns refusal of something genuinely desired, often to display modesty or irony.
• Ben Franklin Effect — The finding that doing a voluntary, costly favor for someone increases the doer's liking of them — the causal arrow running from act to attitude, as cognitive dissonance is cheaply resolved by revising the attitude to fit what one has already done.
• Conflict (Narrative) — A narrative conflict sets a character's pursued aim against resistance that changes action, delay, or choice.
• Door-in-the-Face Technique — A sequential compliance strategy in which a requester first makes a large request expected to be refused, then retreats to a smaller one — the target actually wanted — obtaining higher compliance than the small request cold, chiefly through reciprocal concession and perceptual contrast.
• Ethic of ultimate ends — In Weber's political ethics, an ethic of ultimate ends makes fidelity to a conviction decisive while assigning bad consequences elsewhere, in contrast with responsibility for foreseeable effects.
• Sequential Compliance Technique — A requester deliberately stages an initial request or response-producing interaction so that its acceptance, refusal, or apparent concession changes the target's state and raises compliance with a later target request above the rate the later request would obtain alone.
• Suspension of Disbelief — Within a bounded encounter with fiction, retain actual-world disbelief while withholding it from governing participation, so prescribed impossibilities can be imagined and assessed on the work's terms without becoming real-world beliefs.