Study on commitment and follow-through

Question

I'm faced with a UX problem of looking for ways to position a website to increase attendance at future "real world" events, and I'm remembering a study once conducted along these lines (details a bit hazy):

University students were given a presentation on the benefit of receiving flu shots and instructed on where to go to get them. One session's group received no further materials, while the other's group were given a map and asked to pick a time to report. The attendance rate in the latter group was substantially higher than the former.

I can't seem to find mentions of it online anywhere, though, and if anyone could point me towards more information on this or any other related study it would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

The study you are looking for is

Leventhal, H., Singer, R., & Jones, S. (1965). Effects of fear and specificity of recommendation upon attitudes and behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2(1), pp. 20-29. doi: 10.1037/h0022089

The study is mostly how you remember (though it was tetanus instead of the flu). Critically, the manipulation was intended to increase the the availability of receiving a tetanus shot by having rehearsed the steps needed to get one. Students were given a map of the campus with the health center circled, and were asked to review their schedule and find a time they might be able to go--however, they did not make an appointment. Thus, the commitment was only to themselves.

There are, of course, a wide variety of ways to increase consumer compliance, including the foot-in-the-door strategy, door-in-the-face strategy, and framing effects to name a few.

There is a wide body of literature in social psychology on the idea of influence. I highly recommend two books on the topic, both of which are leisure reads:

1) Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (which mentions the Leventhal study!)

2) Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini. There is a chapter specifically on Commitment (ch 3) which also talks about the classic foot-in-the-door paper (below), more in line with the commitment strategy you suggest.

Freedman, J.L., & Fraser, S.C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 195-202.

Answer 2

I've found an article by O'Keefe and Jensen (2007) that seems somewhat relevant. It's a meta-analysis that finds, according to their abstract (p. 623):

"...in disease prevention messages, gain-framed appeals, which emphasize the advantages of compliance with the communicator’s recommendation, are statistically significantly more persuasive than loss-framed appeals, which emphasize the disadvantages of noncompliance."

The difference appears quite small, however; maybe not what you were looking for.

Reference:

O'Keefe, D. J., & Jensen, J. D. The relative persuasiveness of gain-framed loss-framed messages for encouraging disease prevention behaviors: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Health Communication, 12, 623-644.