The present study examined incidental similarity and whether it impacted the participant’s compliance tocomplete a task for someone with whom she supposedly shared her birthday. A group of seventy-fivefemale undergraduates participated in Burger et al.’s Study 1 and received class credit as compensation.The participants were led to believe they signed up for a study on astrology. A female confederate, posingas another participant, joined the participant in a room and sat 4 ft away from her. A female experimenterexplained to the women that the purpose of the experiment was to study the relation between personalityand astrological signs and gave them questionnaires to fill out. This gave the confederate an opportunityto glance at the participant’s paper and learn her birthday. Half of the participants were randomlyassigned to the similarity condition, and the other half to the control group. The experimenter collectedthe questionnaires and administered personality tests, explaining the tests depended on the participant’sastrological sign. The experimenter asked the confederate for her birthday and if the participant wasassigned to the similarity condition, the confederate stated that her birthday was the same as theparticipant’s. If the participant was in the control group, the confederate’s birthday was always differentfrom the participant’s. After the similarity condition group established their birthday, neither theconfederate nor the experimenter mentioned the incidental similarity throughout the remainder of theexperiment. When the study concluded and the experimenter left, the confederate asked the participant torevise the confederate’s 8-page English paper and write a page of feedback about the arguments made inthe paper. 62.2% of participants in the similarity condition agreed to the request, versus 34.2% ofparticipants with different birthdays than the confederate. As expected, if participants shared the samebirthday with the woman requesting a favor, the participant was more likely to comply than if the womendid not share a birthday. Researchers explained that the participants in the similarity condition reacted tothe request in a heuristic fashion due to the attraction to the fact that they shared a birthday with theconfederate, and therefore considering the interaction as a favor for a
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