Can you clean the kitchen because it's Tuesday?

For this week's blog I decided to try out one of the persuasive techniques we've learnt about on one of my unsuspecting housemates.
In our house we have a weekly chores rota for chores like cleaning the kitchen, tidying the living space and taking the bins out which we all rotate around. We complete these chores on a Tuesday evening normally because that's when the bins need to go out.
This week I was down on the rota to clean the kitchen.

I decided to take inspiration from Langer and colleagues (1978) to try to avoid my chore for the week.

In Langer et als (1978) study, a confederate approached adults who were queuing to use a photocopier and asked one of three questions:

1) "Excuse me, I have five pages. may I use the Xerox machine?"

2) "Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?"

3)"Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I'm in a rush?"

Question 1 was a request only condition, question 2 used placebic information and question 3 used real information. The results table is below:

For question 1, 60% of participants complied with the request, for question 3 this rose to 94%. However for question 2, even though the information was completely irrelevant, the compliance was still very high at 93%.

This shows that simply giving a reason, no matter how irrelevant can still aid you in persuading people to do as you ask.

I therefore decided it would be most fun to attempt using irrelevant reasoning.

I spent a while deciding on what my reason would be e.g. "because it's a Tuesday"/"because you cleaned the kitchen last week" etc. However the line I ended up using was:
"Hi Megan, could you clean the kitchen today because I took the bins out last week?"
This was irrelevant information because similar to the "because I need to make copies" reason, it's just stating information. My reason had nothing to do with this week, why I should not clean the kitchen, or why she should.

However to my complete surprise she replied "yeah sure, no problem"! Therefore, this was a good example of how powerful the word "because" can be.

However, this did then backfire, due to me feeling bad that she was doing a chore that I should have been doing, therefore I ended up helping her anyway. But nevertheless, it was still quite exciting to see that the technique worked!

Langer, E., Blank, A., & Chanowitz, B. (1978) The Mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action: The Role of "Placebic" Information in Interpersonal Interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 635-642.