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thought that the “volunteer worker” who asked them to sign a state beautification petition was really interested in having them display a safe-driving billboard two weeks later? And who among them could have suspected that their decision to display the billboard was largely due to the act of signing the petition? No one, I’d guess.

If there were any regrets after the billboard went up, who could they conceivably hold responsible but themselves and their own damnably strong civic spirit? They probably never even considered the guy with the “keeping California beautiful” petition and all that knowledge of jujitsu.

Notice that all of the foot-in-the-door experts seem to be excited about the same thing: You can use small commitments to manipulate a person’s self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into “public servants,” prospects into “customers,” prisoners into “collaborators.” And once you’ve got a man’s self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself.

Not all commitments affect self-image, however. There are certain conditions that should be present for a commitment to be effective in this way. To discover what they are, we can once again look to the American experience in the Chinese prison camps of Korea. It is important to understand that the major intent of the Chinese was not simply to extract information from their prisoners.

It was to indoctrinate them, to change their attitudes and perceptions of themselves, of their political system, of their country’s role in the war, and of communism. And there is evidence that the program often worked alarmingly well.

Dr. Henry Segal, chief of the neuropsychiatric evaluation team that examined returning POWs at the war’s end, reported that warrelated beliefs had been substantially shifted. The majority of the