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Fear‐then‐relief, mindlessness, and cognitive deficits

The assumption that mindlessness underlies the effectiveness of the ‘fear-then-relief’ social influence technique has been verified in four studies. The first two experiments indicated that compliance of those experiment participants who were made to function on the thoughtful level under a ‘fear-thenrelief’ condition decreases to the level observed in the control group. The other two experiments were to analyze the cognitive functioning of people who at first experience fear and then a sudden and unexpected relief. The first of these experiments indicated that the amount of time needed to detect the expression of emotion on other persons’ faces is prolonged, and the second of these latter two experiments that the participants’ arithmetical abilities are impaired (mental addition and subtraction of three two-digit numbers). Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The fear-then-relief scene already belongs to the canon of action cinema and literature: two policemen run an interrogation; the first is very severe—usually older, he yells at the suspect and sometimes even beats him or her. Then suddenly the other policeman—a friendly man, who proposes coffee and a cigarette, and thinking aloud how to help the suspect, takes his place. Very often under these new unexpected circumstances, the suspect—so far obstinately refusing any form of cooperation—starts to confess everything, implicating not only himself or herself but even his or her companions. Dolinski and Nawrat (1998) assumed that the above ‘good cop–bad cop’ scenario is only an exemplification of a general rule, and is not just a specific phenomenon connected uniquely with police interrogation. They set forth the hypothesis that a sudden retraction of the external sources of fear leads to people’s increased compliance with various requests, suggestions, and commands. They demonstrated, for instance, that requests to fill in a questionnaire or to make a charity donation were fulfilled much more willingly by people who had just heard the sound of a police whistle while crossing the road in a place not intended for that purpose, and after having turned their eyes in the direction of the sound suddenly realized that somebody (not a policeman) was just playing a joke.