Freedman and Fraser's lawn-sign study is chapter 3, and the number to keep is that a three-inch window sticker more than tripled agreement to a billboard.
The defense against this cannot be refusing small requests. That would make you both unpleasant and, in the other direction, exploitable — a person who refuses everything trivial is not exercising judgment, they are substituting a different rule for one.
The defense has to operate on the sequence, because the sequence is where the mechanism lives.
Bem's self-perception account explains why the individual steps are the wrong unit of analysis. Each request is evaluated against a self-concept that the previous one edited. So examining any single step will always produce the answer that it is reasonable, because it was designed to be reasonable relative to where you now are.
The detection protocol is therefore to plot the trajectory rather than to assess the item.
For any request from a person or organization, write down what you have already agreed to with them, in order, with dates and magnitudes. Three things become visible immediately and none of them is visible from inside a single decision.
The direction. Are the asks getting larger, and at what rate.
The reciprocity. Has anything come back, or is the flow one-way.
And the escalation interval. A shortening gap between requests is a stronger signal than the size of any of them.
The single most useful question, and it is chapter 3's, is the zero-based one: would I accept this request as a first approach from a stranger?
If the answer is no, then the sequence is doing the work rather than the request, and the correct response is not to decline this particular item — it is to renegotiate from zero.
That phrase means something specific and it is worth saying it plainly, out loud, to the other party: I want to look at this from the beginning, as though we were starting today. What is being asked, what do I get, and what is the total.
The reaction to that request is itself diagnostic, and it is the same test as chapter 304's. Someone with a legitimate ask will answer it. Someone running a ladder will treat the request as a betrayal, will invoke what you have already agreed to, or will reframe the reassessment as a character failure.
This counters Law 3.
Counters Law 3, Ask For Almost Nothing First