| Compliance-gaining interactions hold great potential far rejection, negative affect, and face-loss. Consequently, the individuals involved are likely to utilize certain cognitive-emotional processes in order to evaluate and make sense of such events. This dissertation specifically examines the impact of counterfactual thinking and rejection sensitivity on a requester's behavior prior to delivering a request, and following request refusal. It was hypothesized that individuals who reported greater expectations for noncompliance would be most likely to generate prefactual thoughts, and these thoughts would help individuals high in self-efficacy (HSE) and low in rejection sensitivity (LRS) to construct conventional request messages. Additionally, it was expected that following request refusal, LRS individuals and HSE individuals would be likely to construct upward counterfactuals in order to make sense of, and learn from, the rejection episode. To test these assumptions, undergraduate students were randomly assigned to complete questionnaires about a hypothetical compliance-gaining scenario wherein they were asked to make a request of another individual. Contrary to expectations, greater anticipation for noncompliance did not facilitate prefactual generation. However, following prefactual generation, HSE individuals and LRS individuals reported greater positive affect and greater feelings of preparedness regarding the impending compliance-gaining interaction. Additionally, individuals who engaged in prefactual thinking were more likely to identify potential obstacles to gaining compliance, and this identification process was positively associated with constructing conventional requests. Nevertheless, while HRS individuals were more likely than LRS individuals to identify potential obstacles to compliance, HRS individuals did not learn from this process as they were not more likely to construct conventional requests. Lastly, rejection sensitivity was not found to influence the extent of counterfactual generation, or the likelihood of delivering a subsequent request to the initial target of influence. Thus, although there is evidence that individuals do engage in prefactual and counterfactual thinking regarding request refusal situations, the extent to which they do so is not related to anticipated noncompliance, self-efficacy, or rejection sensitivity. Future research directions are discussed. |
