ABSTRACT
The use of commitment and consistency principles in research and applied fields has demonstrated how effective these principles are in influencing behaviour. Commitment and consistency are effective because people have the desire to maintain consistency with their self-concept, self-presentation, values, and behaviours. Commitments are acts that bind people to future behaviour, providing a mechanism through which consistency is engaged. When individuals make a commitment to behave in a certain way, they are more likely to follow through with the behaviour. Commitment and consistency have been leveraged in a variety of ways to influence behaviour. Strategies such as the foot-in-the-door technique, binding communications, the low-ball technique, and the ‘four walls’ technique involve low-cost preparatory acts that increase the likelihood of acceptance of subsequent high-cost target requests. Other strategies may remind people of their values or previous behaviours in order to influence desired behavioural outcomes. Since many of these strategies can easily be implemented, they have been used in a variety of applied settings to affect behaviour change. Research has also focused on moderators by examining the conditions under which commitment and consistency strategies are most and least effective.
