Human interaction in its most basic form can be described as a battle of wills. Different parties with different agendas come together, each hoping to get what they want with as little effort or cost as possible. Everyone wants something for as close to nothing as possible. This was the impetus for exploring the foot-in-the-door technique. The foot-in-the-door technique, also called the gradation technique, refers to the assumption that a person who has already fulfilled a small request is more likely to accept a larger one later. This technique contrasts significantly with others that aim to influence behavior in that it seeks to do so without the use of “external pressure.” While much attention has been paid to pressure-based techniques, not as much emphasis has been placed on techniques such as the foot-in-the-door technique, leaving many questions about their effectiveness and limitations unanswered. This absence of investigation is what prompted Jonathan L. Freedman and Scott C. Fraser of Stanford University to perform their 1965 study of the foot-in-the-door technique. The study consisted of two similar experiments. The first experiment was quite simple. 136 housewives from Palo Alto, California were chosen as test subjects, randomly selected from a telephone directory and divided into four groups. Members of the first two groups received a call from an experimenter claiming to be a representative of the California Consumers' Group. During the call they were asked to participate in a survey about household soaps. This served as a “small request” with which researchers attempted to induce compliance with a larger request. In the first group, called Performance Condition, subjects who agreed...half of the paper...initial request, agreed to the broader request. Furthermore, as the researchers hypothesized, groups in which the problem or task were similar had higher rates of compliance. However, even the group in which neither the task nor the problem were similar achieved greater compliance than the control group. The results of the second experiment did little to confirm or deny the assumption developed in the first experiment that attachment to a person or issue plays a significant role in increasing the rate of compliance. After all, there was a notable increase in compliance in two groups whose first and second requests were not about the same issue. On this basis the researchers hypothesized that it was possible that the change in attitude caused by involvement was not necessarily towards a specific person or issue, but rather towards granting requests in general.