Langer and Abelson (1972) hypothesized that the frequency in compliance to a "legitimate" request for help would be greater when the opening phrase was "victim-oriented" and also to an "illegitimate" request when the opening phrase was "target-oriented." Victim-oriented appeals started with a statement of the victim's need, whereas the target-oriented shifted attention immediately to the object of the request. Results of their study confirmed their hypothesized interaction between legitimacy and type of appeal and Innes (1974) confirmed these results in a cross cultural sample.

In a finer grained chi-square analysis, the subjects revealed that they recognized legitimate appeals more than illegitimate ones and victim-oriented appeals over target-oriented ones. (See Tables 17 & 18). If, for the purpose of this study, it can be argued that recognition may be a factor in attention, then the present results suggest that legitimate victim-oriented messages and illegitimate target-oriented messages may be more cognitively demanding (that is, get more attention) than their counterparts. By an extension of these results, one could then suggest the implications of these results for various appeals for help and charity. It could be argued that it would be better to use victim-oriented appeals when the request was one that would probably be seen as legitimate in that sub-culture, and target-oriented appeals when the request might be perceived as illegitimate.

These two studies suggested that the frequency of compliance was greater in the legitimate victim-oriented and in the illegitimate target-oriented appeals. These two types of appeal for help appear to motivate, or "demand, " and somehow move the passers-by to comply in helping the victim more often. If this explanation is true, then it follows that these types of appeals are remembered better than the alternative ones. The present study tested the hypothesis that legitimate victim-oriented and illegitimate target-oriented appeals are remembered better than legitimate target-oriented and illegitimate victim oriented ones. Both memory recall and recognition tests were administered to eight groups of twenty students enrolled in Communication 1113 after their viewing a video tape of the same messages used in Langer and Abelson's study. The recognition test confirmed this hypothesis, but the recall test did not support confirmation. Since recognition memory is easier than recall, obviously these results provide only weaker support for Langer and Abelson findings than if the subjects had been able to recall the messages.