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Small Decisions Lead to Bigger More Far- Reaching Decisions:
There is a phenomenon in social psychology known as “the foot in the door technique,” which helps explain how compliance with a small demand leads to greater commitments to larger demands later on. This was shown and discussed by Freedman and Fraser (1966), Orenstein (1991) and others (Pliner, 1974; Greenwald, 1987; and Lipsitz, 1989) in a variety of experiments.
The typical experiment of this type consists of researchers asking research subjects to comply with an unreasonable demand. One such type of demand was to see if people would volunteer to place a large, ugly sign on their front door that read, “Drive Carefully.” Only 17% of research subjects agreed to the request on its face. Another group was asked to place a small three-inch sign with a similar slogan. Nearly all agreed. After this they were asked if they would display the large ugly sign, and a remarkable 76% agreed to the request.
This experiment and many others like it suggest that if people make “small decisions,” the likelihood of them making large-scale decisions of the same type later on increases.
As applied to visitation refusal, children make the “small decision,” to avoid visitation once, often for benign reasons, perhaps because they have something better to do. Parents allow a child to make a “small decision” to avoid seeing the visiting parent because at that moment the child feels uncomfortable or “bored” or “annoyed” or any of the other excuses children use to avoid visitation. It would seem that these “small decisions” become the basis for later larger
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