Preference for consistency and social influence: A review of current research findings

Throughout the history of social psychology there has been a strong and longstanding belief that individuals are generally consistent within their attitudes and behaviors; yet there is a track record of small effect sizes and difficulty in replicating findings involving consistency-based phenomena. To address this discontinuity, Cialdini, Trost, and Newsom (1995) developed a scale to assess individual differences in preference for consistency (PFC)—differences that they argued might account for the puzzling pattern. The PFC scale measures individual differences in the desire to be consistent, to be perceived as consistent, and for others to be consistent. This paper reviews the literature on social influence and PFC and evaluates the contribution this scale has made to the social influence literature in years since its initial introduction.