Question

You’re trying to convince your roommate to start recycling old papers and pop cans. Your roommate is quite resistant to start, believing that recycling isn’t worth the effort and makes little difference in the environment. When your roommate rejects your pro-recycling messages, you decide to take a different approach, using messages that fall in your roommate’s latitude of acceptance. Why might this be a bad idea?

Answer 1

Your roommate will perceive your messages as too similar to the anchor point and experience the assimilation effect (The assimilation effect, assimilation bias or biased assimilation is a bias in evaluative judgments towards the position of a context stimulus, while contrast effects describe a negative correlation between a judgment and contextual information).