The 1966 Safe-Driver Sign Experiments, Checked Against the Paper and Its Meta-Analyses

The photograph shown to homeowners in Palo Alto, California, in the mid-1960s pictured an attractive house with a sign reading “Drive Carefully” planted in front of it. According to the paper, the picture “was taken so that the sign obscured much of the front of the house and completely concealed the doorway,” and the lettering was “rather poorly lettered.” Households that had never been asked anything before agreed to put it on their lawn 16.7 percent of the time. Households that had first been asked for something small, such as a three-inch paper sign or a petition signature, agreed far more often.

Does the foot-in-the-door technique actually work? On average, yes, but weakly and unreliably. Three meta-analyses from the 1980s found overall effects of r = .09 to .17, nearly half of the early studies showed no effect or a reversal, and a 2020 direct replication in Poland and Ukraine found the effect fading or absent. The 1966 numbers that made the technique famous have never been matched.

What did Freedman and Fraser’s two experiments measure?

The paper is Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser of Stanford, “Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1966, volume 4, issue 2, pages 195 to 202. It reports two field experiments. Both asked whether agreeing to a small request raises the odds of agreeing to a much larger one.

Experiment 1 was done by telephone. The subjects were 156 Palo Alto housewives chosen from the phone book, 36 in each of four conditions. Posing as the California Consumers’ Group, a caller asked some of them to answer eight questions about household soaps (“What brand of soap do you use in your kitchen sink?”). Three days later the same caller asked for something far bigger: letting five or six men come into the home for two hours to go through cupboards and storage places and classify every household product. Of the 36 women in the soap-questions group, 52.8 percent agreed. Of 36 women contacted once, with only the big request, 22.2 percent did.

Experiment 2 is the lawn-sign study, and the one that supplies the famous image. It was run face to face rather than by phone, and the two requests came from different people about two weeks apart. First requests came in four versions: a three-inch paper sign reading “Be a safe driver” for a window or car, a similar “Keep California Beautiful” sign, or a petition on either topic sent to California’s U.S. Senators. The second request, for everyone, was to let a very large “Drive Carefully” sign be installed on the front lawn for a week or a week and a half.

Here are the results as the paper’s Table 2 reports them. The third column converts the paper’s percentages into odds ratios.

First request	Agreed to big sign	Odds ratio vs. control
Control (asked only the big request)	16.7% (4 of 24)	1.0
Safe-driving sign (same issue, same task)	76.0% (19 of 25)	about 16
Safe-driving petition (same issue, different task)	47.8% (11 of 23)	about 4.6
Beauty sign (different issue, same task)	47.6% (10 of 21)	about 4.5
Beauty petition (neither matched)	47.4% (9 of 19)	about 4.5

Which details of the 1966 results get lost in summaries?

Three details tend to get lost. First, the headline “76 percent versus 17 percent” compares the single best-matched cell, 25 households, with a 24-household control. All four first-request groups together, 88 households, agreed 55.7 percent of the time, a figure (49 of 88) that Jerry Burger lists for this experiment in his 1999 review. The paper reports that the lowest experimental cell was above 45 percent and that the best-matched cell’s lead over the other two-contact cells was not significant (chi-square values of 2.7 to 2.9).

Second, nobody put up a sign. The measure was whether a household agreed. Those who did were told the organization was gathering more names than needed and would be in touch in a few weeks, and that ended the experiment. Any summary that says 76 percent “installed” the sign has the measure wrong.

Third, the similarity of the two requests mattered much less than the story implies. A beauty petition, which has almost nothing in common with a giant safe-driving sign, produced about the same agreement as a safe-driving petition. The authors read this as a diffuse change in the person: the subject “may become, in his own eyes, the kind of person who does this sort of thing.” They added that their data could not test that idea against the alternatives.

Experiment 1 carries its own caveat. Only about two thirds of the women agreed to the soap questions, and none who refused later agreed to the large request, yet everyone approached was counted in the group that was asked the soap questions, which the paper calls the Performance condition. The caller in that study also knew each woman’s condition, which is why the authors built Experiment 2 with a second experimenter who was blind to it.

Has the technique held up in later research?

Not at the size of the original. The first systematic count came from Arthur Beaman and colleagues, “Fifteen years of foot-in-the-door research: a meta-analysis,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1983. They pooled 120 experimental groups and concluded that the phenomenon “although replicable, is weak and not nearly as robust as assumed,” and that nearly half of the studies “either produced no effects or effects in the wrong direction.”

A year later James Dillard, John Hunter and Michael Burgoon published their meta-analysis in Human Communication Research (1984). According to the paper’s abstract, both foot-in-the-door and its reverse, door-in-the-face, produced small effects even under optimal conditions, and both required a prosocial topic. They also reported no support for the effort-to-compliance link that self-perception theory predicts. Beaman’s group had reached a milder version of the same verdict a year earlier, calling the self-perception explanation imprecise in the clear predictions it yields, though their data had implications for the theory.

Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University then reviewed the whole literature in Personality and Social Psychology Review (1999). He summarized the three meta-analyses, a third by Fern and colleagues in 1986, as finding an overall effect that was “relatively small,” with r between .09 and .17. Each concluded that the effect occurs more often than chance would predict. His own tallies, as he reports them, split sharply by procedure:

• Same requester, no delay between requests, 24 studies: exactly half favored the technique, r = .05.
• Same requester, delay of two or more days, 7 studies: six of seven favored it, r = .07.
• Different requester, delayed, 28 studies: r = .12 across 3,627 people.
• First request carried out (rather than only agreed to): r = .14 across 8,356 people. Agreed but not performed: r = .05.

Burger also reports outright reversals. In a 1980 study by Harari, Mohr and Hosey, 56.8 percent of controls (25 of 44) complied with the target request against 33.3 percent (19 of 57) after the small one, as Burger tabulates it.

For the effect in plain terms, the standard r-to-d-to-odds-ratio conversion puts r = .12 at an odds ratio of about 1.5. That would move a baseline compliance rate of 20 percent to roughly 28 percent, a gain of about eight points. The 1966 lawn-sign figures imply an odds ratio near 6 for all experimental cells pooled, and near 16 for the best cell.

Did anyone try to repeat the original study exactly?

One direct replication appears in the literature reviewed here. Gamian-Wilk and Dolinski of SWPS University in Wroclaw ran a direct replication of the original foot-in-the-door experiment in Poland and Ukraine in two periods, and reported it in Psychological Reports (2020). In 2003 the technique worked in Ukraine but not in Poland. In 2013 the effect was not significant in either country. The abstract also says that the effect size Freedman and Fraser obtained “has never been obtained again” in later work. The authors attribute the pattern to what they call the high ecological validity of the procedure.

That phrase is a matter of interpretation. A direct replication in different decades and countries changes the culture, the telephone and the sense of what a stranger’s request means, along with everything else, so a null cannot be pinned on the original design alone. The Gamian-Wilk result shows fragility more than falsity.

Why might a small yes change what comes next?

Several accounts of the effect compete, and Burger’s contribution was to say they probably all operate at once. His review lists six: self-perception, reactance, conformity to a norm, consistency needs, attributions, and commitment. Self-perception, the idea that people infer their attitudes from watching what they do, is the oldest, and Bem’s 1967 reading of the $1 versus $20 lie experiment explains the logic. Consistency, the belief that people stay in line with earlier acts, is the usual popular account, and the consistency principle as Cialdini describes it is the usual statement of it.

The data are lopsided on this question. Burger pooled studies in which the first request was high involvement against low involvement and against no first request: high involvement gave r = .17 against controls, low involvement gave r = .08. Performing the first act mattered, and agreement alone produced much less. His review also found that when people were first asked for something very large and refused, later compliance fell (odds ratio 0.65 across three studies). Reactance and suspicion can overwhelm the pull toward consistency, and in the studies Burger tallied the effect looks weakest when the same person makes both requests back to back, the arrangement most casual descriptions of the technique assume. Freedman and Fraser saw a hint of the same thing in their own controls: they suspected some women felt manipulated by a stranger who called three days later with an odd favor.

Dillard and colleagues add a puzzle for the self-perception story. If agreeing makes a person see themselves as helpful, a harder first task should work better, because it is better evidence of helpfulness. They found no such relationship.

What survives for anyone designing a small ask?

Four conclusions have the most support. The effect is most dependable when the first request is real, completed, and relevant to a cause the person already likes. Dillard and colleagues found the effect did not depend on the delay between requests, though Burger found same-requester, back-to-back pairings the weakest. The first request has to be one people are likely to grant, since refusals do not help later. And the expected gain is a few percentage points, far from a doubling.

A related claim, that small favors can raise liking for the requester, belongs to a different literature, and the Ben Franklin effect is its best-known example. Treating either as a lever with a fixed payout is the mistake the meta-analyses warn against.

The most accurate one-sentence summary of 60 years of work is Burger’s own: the combined effects of several processes “can account for successful FITD demonstrations as well as studies in which the technique was ineffective or led to a decrease in compliance.” In 1966, in a handful of Palo Alto blocks, with a sign nobody would actually install, the processes lined up. Later researchers have mostly found them pulling in different directions.