Cross-Cultural Investigation of Compliance Without Pressure: The “You Are Free to. . .” Technique in France, Ivory Coast, Romania, Russia, and China

Compliance-without-pressure techniques have been widely studied in North America and West Europe. Among these techniques, the “but you are free” (BYAF) is a verbal compliance procedure that solicits someone to comply with a request by simply telling a person that he or she is free to accept or refuse the request. This technique is interpreted with the commitment theory and the psychological reactance theory which are more relevant in individualistic cultures than in collectivist cultures. So, four studies compared the efficiency of the BYAF technique in collectivist cultures (Ivory Coast, Russia, and China) and in individualist cultures (France and Romania). As suggested in the hypothesis, our analysis indicated that the BYAF technique will be much less successful in more collectivist cultures. Such results underline the importance of considering specific cultural contexts in social influence studies.