The foot-in-the-door (FITD) technique is a concept in social psychology. The technique is used to persuade people based on the idea that they will be more likely to agree to a later significant request if they comply with a small request first. The name comes from door-to-door sales in which salesmen figuratively put their foot-in-the-door when persuading customers.
For example, in a Stanford University study, a group of women was asked if researchers could go to their home and take an inventory of their soap products. Of course, many of those women declined. However, another group of women was asked the same thing, but first, they were asked a few questions about their soap products (the initial, small request). This group was far more likely to agree to the demanding inventory request.
This effect occurs because the gradually more demanding requests foster a relationship between the requester and the subject, making them more likely to comply to later, larger requests.
Nazi Germany employed the FITD technique by getting slightly more extreme with each of their policies gradually over time. In the beginning of Nazi rule, persecution of Jews started with a boycott of Jewish businesses–nothing violent yet. The Nazis said they were just trying to force the guilty Jews out of their country. Many Germans saw this as acceptable because they believed the propaganda that the Jews were controlling society and taking all the successful jobs away from the Germans. Thus, Germans shouldn’t buy from their shops, and Jews should be forced to leave Germany. Then, this escalated to Kristallnacht in which Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked, 7000 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 1000 synagogues were burned, and 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Because the Germans had already found the initial persecution okay, they were more likely to find this okay. Violence was the natural progression to get the remaining Jews to leave Germany. If the Nazis had started with this violence, the Germans probably would’ve been less complicit.
The Nazis did something similar with concentration camps. Dachau was the first concentration camp built to re-educate and punish enemies of the state like communists and other political opponents. Most of the prisoners weren’t killed and were actually released after a year of psychological torture and beatings. Many Germans probably saw this as an acceptable method to contain and convert the subversive communists. Then, some concentration camps became death camps, where people arrived but never left. Because the Nazis started with concentration camps that didn’t kill people, the Germans were more likely to find it acceptable when the Nazis phased in killings. It was a small step to introduce more violence into the camps versus what would’ve been a big initial leap to death camps.
Because of all of these small steps, the German people were never shocked by the atrocities of the Nazis. This made it easier for them to be complicit and obey and harder to unite and stand up against the Nazis.
I think this is really interesting and something we learned about in AP psych. I think this happened in the Milgram prison experiment. The guards slowly ramped up their tactics. When they realized a small thing was not challenged by a greater authority they continued acting more and more distastefully because nobody was declining each progressive move.
ReplyDeleteI never thought about their technique like that before, but the foot in the door makes so much sense, when thinking about how the Nazi party manipulated so many Germans into doing atrocious acts. This relates to what we were reading in some of the memoirs in the Holocaust and Human Behavior reader where many of the people who helped the Nazi party seem to reflect back on this technique being use. Hitler, the Nazi party and Germans in general, started small overall, with small discriminatory acts against Jews, and built up to laws being passed that discriminated against them, to the mass murder of Jews. Slowly and steadily over the course of many years the Nazi party built up this campaign on control, conformity, and fear and when the acts of hatred against Jews and other minorities kept increasing, the citizens were so used to them occurring that when the next one happened it didn't seem that bad. Since the new acts now become the baseline for these people, they didn't see to be that shocked.
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