The low-ball technique, a tactic often used by automobile sales dealers to produce compliance from customers, was examined in a set of three experiments. In all three studies, a requester who induced subjects to make an initial decision to perform a target behavior and who then made performance of the behavior more costly obtained greater final compliance than a requester who informed subjects of the full costs of the target behavior from the outset. The low-ball phenomenon-that an active preliminary decision to take an action tends to persevere even after the costs of performing the action have been increased-was found to be reliable (Experiment 1), different from the foot-in-the-door effect (Experiment 2), and effective only when the preliminary decision was made with a high degree of choice (Experiment 3). In competition with three other conceptual explanations, a formulation based on the concept of commitment was seen to best account for the results. An ecologically derived strategy for the identification and investigation of research questions was used and discussed.

Grace is an interesting and potentially significant domain within positive psychology, but remains largely neglected. The present study examined the relationships among three known grace scales to evaluate the potential for creating a stronger single measure. It also explored their relationships to several other religious/spiritual measures to examine whether the three scales are measuring the same construct, to explore the implications for our understanding of grace, and to provide insights for further study. The three measures had moderately strong correlations with each other (r = .55 to .66), had similar relationships to other measures of religion/spirituality, and had distinct relationships to measures of psychological health and distress. This suggested that the three scales measure somewhat different constructs. Two grace scales showed significant negative skew, indicating ceiling problems. Differences in the underlying grace constructs, contamination by other concepts, or an underlying multidimensional structure for grace could account for these differences. Further study should better articulate the constructs underlying grace measures, address problems related to negative skew in responses, and clarify whether grace is multidimensional.

Sandage, Worthington, Jr., Hight, and Berry (2000) pointed out that most of the research on forgiveness has focused on the process of granting forgiveness rather than seeking forgiveness. Therefore, in this project, college students were asked to recall a recent event from their past where they harmed someone with whom they had a relationship. They were then asked to rate their feelings following the transgression such that it was possible to determine the extent to which they experienced sorrow or guilt (Narramore, 1984). Participants also indicated how they responded to the situation. In addition, a few weeks later, these same students were invited to respond to a dispositional measure designed to tap their general tendencies toward experiencing sorrow or guilt. One of the particularly interesting findings from this study was that the efforts to measure sorrow seemed to split into two factors. One of these sorrow factors seemed to predict healthy patterns of seeking forgiveness while the other factor did not.

Several studies have considered the ability of devout Christians to accept homosexual persons while rejecting homosexual behavior. Batson, Floyd, Meyer, and Winner (1999) found that intrinsic Christians were not able to make that distinction. Bassett et al. (2000) found that intrinsic Christians were able to distinguish between the value of homosexual persons and behavior. Both studies used financial help as the measure of acceptance. This study replicated the Batson et al. methodology with some modifications. The basic methodology involves students working at a time-limited task, which might financially benefit another “student.” What is varied in the procedure is the description of the other “student” (regarding sexual orientation and what the person intends to do with the money). Results from the study suggested that intrinsic Christians were able to “love the sinner but hate the sin.”

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