The Federal Trade Commission's Cooling-Off Rule has been in force since 1974. It gives American consumers three business days to cancel most sales of twenty-five dollars or more made at their home, workplace, or anywhere other than the seller's normal place of business, and it requires the seller to provide written notice of that right.
The rule exists because of a specific regulatory finding, and the finding is the substance of this chapter: a class of sales was being made whose validity depended entirely on the conditions in the room.
Door-to-door selling compresses the decision. The salesperson is present, socially, in your home, and leaving requires you to be rude. The offer is available now. The paperwork is in front of you. Under those conditions people sign things they do not want, and — the operative point — they know they do not want them within a day.
The remedy the regulator chose is purely temporal. It does not require the seller to change what they say. It restores the deliberation window that the technique removes.
That is the whole of the defense against high-pressure closing, and it generalizes far beyond doorsteps.
The mechanism is chapter 278's. Time pressure removes the capacity that evaluation requires, so processing shifts to peripheral cues — the seller's confidence, the vividness of the pitch, the social cost of refusing. Persuasion produced under those conditions decays sharply once the pressure and the persuader are removed, which is why the cooling-off period works and why sellers dislike it.
The detection protocol is a single sentence, said out loud, and it is diagnostic regardless of the answer.
I'm going to sleep on it.
What happens next is the information. A legitimate offer survives a night. A salesperson with a real product will be disappointed and will follow up. What you should watch for is any of: the offer expires if you leave, the price changes tomorrow, this particular unit will be gone, I would have to check with my manager whether we can hold it, or an appeal to how much time they have already spent with you.
Every one of those is a statement that the sale depends on your current arousal state rather than on the offer's merits, and that is the seller telling you what they think of it.
The counter-response is to know and use the written cancellation right where one exists, and to write your own where it does not: no significant financial commitment on the day it is proposed.
This counters Law 8.