By Nancy Harhut
Philip Kunz got 200 strangers to send him Christmas cards.
My closest friends and family can’t get me to send them one. The truth is I wanted to, and it really bothers me that I haven’t.
It turns out there’s a psychological reason for this. And by “this” I mean the fact that I feel so bad. (The not sending cards is a whole different story.)
It really bothers me to have received cards that I didn’t reply to because of something social scientists call the Reciprocity Principle.
Robert Cialdini, in his book Influence: Science and Practice, explains it this way: We try to repay in kind what another person has provided us.
So if someone buys you lunch, you feel you should pick up the tab the next time. And if someone does you a favor, you feel that you owe them one.
This is why when sociologist Philip Kunz randomly picked 600 names from Utah phonebooks and sent them Christmas greetings, over 200 of those total strangers sent him a card back.
It just felt wrong not to.
In fact, social scientists report that the expectation to reciprocate is found across cultures and appears to be hardwired in humans.
And it gets even better than this.
The feeling that we owe someone something can be so uncomfortable that we’ll actually go above and beyond just to get the debt off our proverbial plate.
As Cialdini states, “Most of us find it highly disagreeable to be in a state of obligation…. For this reason alone then, we may be willing to agree to perform a larger favor than the one we received, merely to relieve ourselves of the psychological burden of debt.”
In marketing, the reciprocity principle can be activated by free samples, unsolicited gifts and trial memberships – all things that eventually prompt us to part with our money.
At a conference several years ago, I met a fundraiser for the Susan G. Komen Foundation. After hearing my presentation, which referenced the reciprocity principle, she confided that they’d repeatedly tried to move away from sending free address labels with their appeal letters, but couldn’t.
You can imagine why not.
People would get the mailing. In one hand, they’d hold these personalized address labels that they didn’t ask for, yet they now have. And in the other hand, they’d hold a letter asking for a contribution.
It could be hard to say no.
Say what you will about your ability to ignore the pull of solicitations like these. Clearly, in the case of the Foundation, enough people felt obligated to donate. And to donate considerably more than the value of the address labels. The principle is powerful.
Apparently I, on the other hand, am a Reciprocity Reject, at least as far as Christmas cards are concerned. The cards came. Christmas itself came. Yet my greetings never followed.
Now here we are in January and I feel really bad about it – but for very good reason.
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