244 Curr Psychol (2010) 29:235–246 ultimate target request. Our results suggest that social influence strategies that are comprised of a series of requests all work to trigger one underlying process: that of self-regulatory resource depletion. That is, actively responding to the initial request (be that answering a series of cognitively demanding questions as in the present case, or actively rejecting an opening offer as in the DITF-technique) drains the target of its self-regulatory resources. A reduced supply of regulatory resources, in turn, fosters compliance with the actual target request through reliance on salient heuristics. In short, responding in an effortful way to an initial request induces self-regulatory resource depletion, which subsequently encourages heuristic decision-making. In the present research this heuristic decision-making was the result of the principle of commitment/consistency which is embedded in the CQP and other types of FITD scripts. Our findings show that self-control resources are a pivotal intervening construct in the process of compliance. As such the present results nicely align with recent studies in the neighbouring field of attitude change in response to persuasive communication, which have shown that resisting persuasion similarly requires self- regulation and hence becomes more difficult when message recipients are in a state of depletion-induced mindlessness (Burkley 2008; Wheeler et al. 2007). In addition, our findings extend earlier research on the role of self-control in social influence (Fennis et al. 2009; Janssen et al. 2008) in demonstrating the pervasive role of self- regulatory resources in a new domain of compliance gaining. More in particular, whereas these previous studies focused on charitable and prosocial behavior, the present influence setting pertained to political activism, albeit on a small scale (i.e., a student action group arguing for educational reforms and soliciting volunteers). Our findings imply that such activism may not always be fueled by strong political convictions or motivations, but is also spurred when people are deprived of their self-control resources and thus become vulnerable to the activist’s influence attempt targeted at them. In a more dramatic context, this process has also been suggested by Baron (2000) in his influential treatise on coercive political persuasion and indoctrination. More specifically, Baron (2000) pointed out that such coercive programs typically start with a “softening up”-stage in which depletion-inducing factors such as disorientation, stress, or sleep deprivation break down initial resistance by the target. As such, the role of self-regulation and self-regulation failure may constitute a viable and novel perspective to shed light on the dynamics involved in (group) activism, radicalization, religious cults, and possibly even terrorism. The present results showed that resource depletion fully mediated in the impact of the FITD technique on compliance, suggesting that self-control is a necessary and sufficient condition for heuristic decision making in social influence settings. Moreover, our research effectively ruled out (negative and positive) mood as an alternate explanation. Finally, the results suggest that compliance in these sequential request settings cannot be attributed to a general tendency for acquiescence. Indeed, the CQP procedure used in our research produced the highest levels of compliance when participants were asked to argue against their positions on the initial statements rather than in support of them. Hence, the commitment/consistency principle triggered by the CQP technique appears to pertain to the effort devoted to the initial response, rather than the valence of this initial response per se. That is, the