Limiting time for responding enhances behavior corresponding to the merits of compliance appeals: Refutations of heuristic-cue theory in service and consumer

Scarcity has been widely assumed. (e.g., Cialdini, 1993) to function as a cue and thereby hinder evaluative scrutiny of compliance-gaining requests (appeals). In contrast, liberalized commodity theory (Brock & Brannon,1992) postulated that scarcity should augment evaluative scrutiny of requests and thereby enhance behavioral correspondence to the merits of requests. In natural-setting tests, 143 telephone operators and 305 fast-food customers complied more with a request in response to strong than to weak reasons and did so especially when the request was accompanied by scarcity information, operationalized as a time restriction on responding. Thus, restriction did not function as a cue. Rather, in both service and consumer settings, scarcity enhanced behavior that corresponded to the merits of requests. Compliance theorists and practitioners should reconsider the cue claim for compliance appeals and should weigh the implications of bidirectional responding to compliance appeals.