Low-Ball Technique

The low-ball technique is a persuasion and compliance tactic in which a person first secures another person's agreement to a request under an initially favorable set of terms, then afterward reveals a less favorable hidden cost, or otherwise raises the cost of what was agreed to, expecting that the other person will still go through with the commitment rather than back out of it. The technique exploits cognitive dissonance: once a person has committed to what seemed like a good deal, withdrawing from that commitment after the terms worsen creates psychological discomfort, so many people choose to accept the worse adjusted terms rather than abandon the agreement they already made. The psychologist Robert Cialdini and his colleagues Cacioppo, Bassett and Miller documented the effect in a landmark 1978 study, in which psychology students were asked to participate in an early morning research session; when the inconvenient seven a.m. start time was disclosed upfront, only 31 percent of students agreed to participate, but when students first agreed to participate in general and were only told the early time afterward, 56 percent still agreed, and of those, 95 percent actually showed up, compared with only 79 percent of the students who had known the time from the start. The same underlying dynamic appears in everyday sales and negotiation contexts, such as a car dealer who quotes an unusually low price to secure a buyer's commitment before later adding fees, or an airline that advertises a cheap base fare while charging separately for baggage and seat selection.