"Mommy, mommy, mommy," your young son asks frantically. "Can we please buy a new PlayStation î3 console with all of the games
and the wireless controllers so that we don't have to sit near the television?" "No," you reply, "we can't afford to buy all of that!" Seemingly unperturbed by your rejection, your son comes back with "Then can we just buy one new game for our PlayStation î2?" "Okay, I guess so," you answer, not realizing that your precocious son has taken a social psychology class and has just used the ________ technique to get what he wanted.
The answer to the blank space given is door-in-the-face.
<em>Door-in-the-face</em> is a commonly used persuasion technique where an individual asks for a higher request to his respondent, and when the respondent refuses, the individual asks for a more reasonable request where in this case the respondent would probably acquiesce to the request made.
