Straight to Yes by Haider Imam

Author:Haider Imam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

1. Give First, Ask Later

The social phenomenon psychologists refer to as reciprocity is a powerful and fascinating thing. Imagine doing someone you know a favour: perhaps you lend him or her money when they are in a fix, proactively introduce them to their future wife or help them paint their new house, for example. Maybe you could term what you did as “beyond the call of duty,” “adding value” or “an act of friendship or love.”

Now imagine that you’d like their help in the form of a ride to and from the airport for your summer holiday, so you don’t have to pay hundreds for parking. You ask them and they start to make excuses and wriggle out of it. You know they’re free on those dates and can do it but don’t want to do it. How do you feel? How do you feel about them? How do you feel about the balance of your relationship with them?

Most of us would entertain thoughts somewhere along the continuum of, “That’s odd – I thought we had that kind of relationship,” to, “Unbelievable! How out of order is that? The things I’ve done for them!” In this scenario, the rule of reciprocity has been broken.

Reciprocity “makes social exchange possible by allowing one person to initiate giving without fear of losing the initial ‘investment.’ ”1 It’s a way of creating obligations to each other that make it likely that we continue to look out for each other in our tribes. An implicit code of “If you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But someday.”

It’s the reason why savvy charities send out pens and other gifts with their letters, asking for donations. Rather than offering a gift in exchange for a donation, they know that if they give a “free” gift first, the odds of the recipient putting their hand in their pocket increase considerably. In one study, roughly 10,000 donation request letters were sent to potential donors. One third of the letters contained no gift, one third contained a small gift (one postcard plus one envelope) and the final third contained a large gift (four postcards plus four envelopes). The likelihood of donations increased by 17% where the small gift was included but increased by 75% where the large gift was included.2

An eye-opening study by Dennis Regan from 1971 shows us another example of how this process works in the real world. Researchers created an “aesthetic enjoyment” experiment for students at Stanford University, who received a whopping $1.75 each to take part. The experiment was designed to measure the effect of liking and favours on compliance. Test subjects took part in pairs: one an unwitting test subject, the other a confederate (in other words “in” on the experiment).

The experiment manipulated the real test subject into either liking or disliking the confederate before the “art appreciation study” began. During a brief pause between rounds, the confederate slipped out and returned with either two bottles of Coca-Cola or nothing.

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