Modern influence: Reciprocity
This article is part of my modern influence series. If you haven’t already please check out the first in the series.
Why do we feel such a large pull towards doing a favour for someone that has previously done one for us? Why do car salespeople offer a free cup of coffee when you arrive? Why are software companies so willing to give you generous free trials of their products?
The answer to all of these questions is the principle of reciprocity. This principle can be summed up by this quote from Cialdini “We should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.’’ It’s the idea that if someone does you a favour or gives you something, you feel a sense of obligation to return the favour.
This principle is incredibly pervasive in human behaviour. If someone gives us something we feel a strong obligation to return the favour. Just like the other principles I will be discussing, the reason for this comes from the advantage it gave our ancestors thousands/millions of years ago. It is what helped them develop successful communities. Through the mutual sharing of resources and skills tribes could work together to conquer the land and those tribes which were less inclined to help each other. A reciprocating urge was selected for in our evolutionary history as the members of the species who had this sense of reciprocation would be more likely to survive and reproduce in the long run, hence propagating the tendency to reciprocate. Charles Darwin considered reciprocity the reason for our sense of community and he also believed it to be the cornerstone of our morality.
Like most quirks of human psychology, marketers and salespeople have found a way to use reciprocity for their benefit. There are many ways that our inbuilt desire to return a favour can be, and is, manipulated. Free trials, free consultations and the freemium model are all ways that companies create a feeling of indebtedness in their customers. We will go into these examples later on. First, though, let’s look at the evolutionary benefit reciprocity provides.
Altruistic intentions
In one of the seminal papers on reciprocity, Robert Trivers outlines the concept of reciprocal altruism. He defines altruism as behaviour that benefits another organism while being apparently detrimental to the altruistic organism. There are many cases in nature where altruistic behaviour is performed even when on first look it would appear to be a behaviour that would be selected out of an animal. The reason why this kind of behaviour is so widely found in nature is the concept of reciprocity. An organism can safely expend energy and resources helping another as it is safe to assume that at some point in the future the behaviour will be returned.
One example is the warning calls of birds. When a bird gives off a call indicating that a predator is near they are helping other birds at the expense of themselves. By making the call they are making it easier for the predator to locate where they are. On the surface, this behaviour should have been selected against in evolution as it makes it more likely that the calling bird will be eaten and therefore the calling gene dies out. The reason why the behaviour still remains is that by giving off a warning call it increases the chances of other birds surviving and therefore being around to return the favour in the future. This is the heart of reciprocity, doing a favour, expending resources for the benefit of another organism and then at a later date having the favour and expenditure of resources returned.
You may be wondering what is stopping one bird from ‘cheating’ the system and not returning the warning call favour when they detect a predator. The proposed answer to this, in human reciprocity, is the concept of guilt, vengefulness and related emotions. It is thought that these emotions were selected for in evolution in order to reinforce these reciprocal behaviours. It’s very unlikely that birds have such a strong and coherent sense of guilt as us humans but they will likely have some sense of indebtedness and urge to repay the favour of a warning call when they next detect a predator.
The fact that these emotions evolved in us to create and reinforce reciprocal behaviours makes sense and becomes obvious when you consider what is probably the strongest of human emotions: anger. Anger and aggression are almost always the result of someone feeling cheated, someone not getting what they think they deserve and being hard done by. This is an incredibly strong force to create reciprocal behaviour, you are much more likely to repay a favour if you sense that there will be strong repercussions, i.e getting attacked if you do not.
On the other side is the concept of guilt. Think about the times that you feel guilty. It is often when you act differently to how someone, or society as a whole, expected you to act. If you break a promise you will feel guilty, if you say something mean to someone you will feel guilty and on the more extreme end if you steal something or hurt someone you will feel guilty. Guilt can be thought of as the enforcer of the ‘contracts’ you have with society or a specific person. Guilt is the internal regulator of reciprocity.
The majority of humans feel a very strong sense of guilt if they ‘cheat’ someone out of a favour. At first glance, this could seem irrational as you can, in theory, get something for free. If you are guaranteed to get away with stealing something from someone, would it not be rational to steal that thing? Surely evolution would have selected us to carry out these cheating behaviours? It has been hypothesised that certain emotions evolved in humans alongside our tendency to reciprocate in order to push us to return favours, avoid this cheating behaviour and therefore build more cohesive societies. Two evolutionary psychologists, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, have found that the urge to reciprocate in social exchanges fits so closely with the emotions that push us to punish cheaters (feelings of revenge or gratitude) that these emotions likely evolved within us for the reason of pushing us towards reciprocal behaviour.
Debt? No, thanks
Reciprocity can be thought of today as the idea that we don’t like to be in a ‘favour debt’ with someone, i.e. we feel uncomfortable when we know that we owe someone a favour. As soon as the opportunity arises we will aim to balance the books and repay the person with a favour of our own. This discomfort is a result of an increase in cognitive load. As with most of these principles, the aim here is to reduce cognitive load, the mental effort involved in making a decision. It relates back to the two systems of thinking I outlined in my previous article (here). Something which only requires system 1 thinking has very low cognitive load. If you have to switch to system 2 to really consider a decision then that entails a higher level of cognitive load. Everything the brain does, all of the shortcuts and heuristics exist in order to reduce cognitive load and keep as much of our thinking in system 1 as possible.
The idea of reciprocity helps streamline the decision making process in two main ways. One, in that it reduces the discomfort that results from owing someone a favour and two, in that it makes it easier for us to decide who we should help out. It’s a lot easier for our brains to remain in system 1 thinking and to think “Ok, Steve helped me with my car last weekend and so I will happily help him clean out his flat tomorrow” rather than using system 2 thinking and analysing whether helping Steve clean his flat is something you really want to be doing with your day. The system 1 version will likely not even register in our consciousness and we will just feel a vague obligation to help Steve out the next time he asks.
In our evolutionary ancestors’ time, weighing all of the pros and cons of helping someone out, could have resulted in serious harm or even the death of an ally. The fewer things you had to consider in making the decision to help someone, the quicker you could act and the more likely you were to avoid disaster. In the modern age, we very rarely have to make life and death decisions but if we weighed up every possible option we would be paralysed into inaction. A quick, usually unconscious, ‘Do I owe this person a favour?’ or a ‘Has this person done anything for me?’ is enough to put weight behind the decision to act and help the person out.
Giving back to prisoners
The idea of reciprocity being beneficial has found support in a wide variety of applications. In the field of game theory, there is an experiment dubbed the prisoner’s dilemma. This experiment outlines a scenario where two suspected criminals have been arrested and are being separately interrogated. During the interrogation, the detective gives the two suspects an option to either defect and tell on the other person or to cooperate and keep silent. In the experiment several outcomes are given: they both betray each other resulting in both going to prison for 2 years, one betrays the other and the other remains silent resulting in the betrayer going free and the other ending up in prison for 3 years and finally, they both remain silent and they only serve 1 year in prison each.
What should the prisoners do? A purely rational, self-interested prisoner would always betray the other as this results in the largest reward, however, the actual most frequent course of action for participants is to both cooperate. This highlights our inbuilt cooperative urges. It also supports the idea that humans aren’t perfectly rational and that perfect rationality isn’t something we should be striving for, human irrationality is one of the reasons we are so successful as a species. To paraphrase Nassim Taleb, it’s only irrational if it gets you killed.
A competition was held in which a computerised version of the prisoner’s dilemma was designed. It was iterated, meaning that there were many rounds played over and over between two competitors. Each competitor, another computer program, was either rewarded or punished depending on the outcome of a round. At the end of many rounds, a winner was decided. People from across the world were asked to submit computer programs which when put up against other peoples solutions would overall come out the winner. There were many complicated algorithms, ones which always defected, ones which would always cooperate until the opponent defected once and then would defect every other time until the end. The winner, however, was an algorithm named tit-for-tat. This algorithm cooperated for the first round and then, for every subsequent round, reciprocated what the opponent did the round before. If the opponent defected then the next round tit-for-tat would defect and vice versa. This algorithm came out on top and shows that reciprocation isn’t just a nice human attribute, it is a proven successful technique to achieve the best possible outcome in interactions with other agents.
Hare Krishnas
Hopefully, by now you can start to see how a marketing or salesperson could use this quirk of the brain to their advantage. They can offer the prospective customer something first, they will feel an inbuilt sense of obligation to return the favour and therefore will be more likely to comply with whatever they are asking of them. A famous, and now very dated, example of this is that of the Hare Krishnas.
The Hare Krishnas give you a flower or a pamphlet and then ask for a donation after you have taken the flower or pamphlet. Your mind takes the shortcut (heuristic) that as they have given you something first, they deserve to have the favour returned and so, at least the first time you experience this tactic, you are likely to give them money. Only a tiny number of people actually value the gift received but that doesn’t matter, all that matters is that in your mind they have done you a favour and it is now your turn to return it.
This heuristic has been intuitively used by groups such as the Hare Krishnas and various other professional persuaders for decades. Eventually, academia caught on and did some quantitative research into the power of reciprocity. Two researchers James and Bolstein were aiming to assess the effect of monetary incentives on the response to mail surveys. They divided a sample of people into various different groups and sent them a survey to complete and mail back. Some groups were sent a small amount of money ($1 cash, $5 cash, $5 cheque, $10 check, $20 check, or $40 check) with the survey and others were sent just the survey but with the promise of a $50 check once the survey was sent back. The people who were sent the money upfront returned completed surveys a significantly larger number of times than the group who were promised a much larger amount of money on receipt of the completed survey.
This is a very interesting result. The people in the first case already had real money on their person, they weren’t going to receive anything more on completion of the survey and so the optimal, rational, course of action for them would be to just put the survey in the bin and keep the money. The people in the second case had a big incentive, all they had to do was fill in a short survey and make $50, easy. So why did so many more people complete the survey in the first case than in the second?
The answer is, of course, the principle of reciprocity. The researchers had done the people in the first case the initial favour, they had given them money. These people were then indebted to the researchers, causing cognitive discomfort. In order to relieve the discomfort, they filled in the survey and sent it back. The people in the second case had no sense of obligation, they just had the vague offer of $50 in the future. They couldn’t be sure that the researchers were people they could trust and were very likely to just forget about the survey after finishing reading about it. This highlights the power of this principle and how it can lead people to favour a less than optimal course of action.
Reciprocity in the real world
The Hare Krishna example is an outdated one, everyone in modern society has by now learnt to flat out refuse any faux gift offered by a random person on the street. People are still, however, oblivious to how the modern marketer or salesperson manipulates our inbuilt reciprocal urges to get what they want.
Imagine that you are buying something from someone and the price you are happy to pay is £10. To maximise your chance of getting the item for this price a good tactic would be to first offer £5. The person selling it is not happy with this price and asks that you pay more, so you concede and say that you are willing to pay £10. You have now, in a way, done the seller a favour by conceding. They will feel obliged to return the favour by selling the item to you for this new price, whether or not this was the amount they originally would have been happy with. Negotiation as a concept relies on the principle of reciprocity, each party alternates between conceding a point and returning the favour of conceding a point until an agreement is reached.
Another example of reciprocity in action is the way that companies, especially the big software ones, do their employees so many ‘favours’. Amongst other reasons, minimising the time employees need to spend away from the office being one, this massively increases employee commitment. A large part likely due to the sense of obligation they have once a company has done so many favours for them. Free meals, free gym, free technology etc all add up to making the employee feel indebted to the company. They have been done a favour and now they feel obliged to return the favour by working harder, longer and are less likely to leave.
Now, this doesn’t mean that this is always a cynical effort from the companies, they likely genuinely care for their employees, but just because someone doesn’t mean to exploit our in-built heuristics doesn’t mean that they aren’t either, intentionally or otherwise.
You may be thinking this is all just common sense; do something nice for people and they will be nice to you in return. You are right, it is common sense but what I am interested in is how pervasive it is and how it can be used to push people into actions that they aren’t consciously aware of the reasons behind.
In the examples above, the persuading party were the ones to decide both the favour they offer to you and the favour they receive in return. This is an unequal exchange. Not only are you obliged to return a favour you didn’t ask for in the first place, but it has also been decided upon by the people trying to persuade you. They are in complete control of the exchange. In the Hari Krishna example, they decide what the favour they do for you is, giving you a flower or pamphlet, and they also decide on what the favour you will reciprocate with, giving them money. The persuader, of course, decides the favour they will do for you will be of less value than the one they want in return.
A free lunch
The most obvious example in the modern world is the concept of the freemium model. A company will let you use their application or product, with reduced features, for usually an indefinite amount of time. The application or product will offer advanced features for a price. This model is successful for several reasons (which I will explore in later articles) but one of the most important is the idea of reciprocity. As explained above, the company is doing you a ‘favour’ by letting you use their app free of charge. This comes with little cost for them and the resulting gratitude you feel towards them is worth much more. Whenever an advert pops up to move onto a paid subscription you will be much more likely to pay than if you had not had the free trial. The same is true for in-app purchases in video games. They will periodically give you free items during the game, which to them are completely worthless, and when it comes time for you to actually spend money the chances are you will.
This isn’t a new concept. In the past door to door salespeople would leave a product with a household for a period of time as a free trial and then return a few weeks later to take an order that the customer would inevitably make out of their sense of obligation. In the modern world it is increasingly easy for a company to do and the initial ‘favour’ they do you usually costs them very little. We shouldn’t be too cynical about this and it’s also likely that an app or service is so good that after a period of using the freemium option you want to upgrade based solely on the quality of the offering. Even then the obligation to return the favour will be playing a part in your decision.
Almost every software company in existence provides a free trial or freemium tier of their product. This shows how successful the idea of giving something for free can be at driving sales and user uptake. Some notable examples are Spotify, Dropbox and Evernote. All three offer a basic version of their service to users completely free of charge while also offering a paid version with more advanced features. Spotify has a conversion rate of around 20%, meaning that a quarter of their free tier users end up paying for the advanced tier. This is incredibly high for a software product and while likely mainly down to the quality of the product the urge to reciprocate Spotify’s perceived generosity no doubt plays a part.
There are many cloud computing platforms (a place that provides website hosting and enterprise-scale software infrastructure) around today and a large part of their offering is freemium, free tier, services, i.e they offer a large proportion of their services for free up to a certain usage level. For Amazon or Google, this level of usage will cost them next to nothing, for a hobbyist being able to host a website and do basic cloud computing for free is invaluable. The result of this is that if you decide you need more substantial cloud computing you are likely to find it very easy to agree to pay to upgrade your account to one of the paid tiers. There are several principles of influence in play here which I will discuss in future articles (link here) but the basic idea for now is; they have given you something and so must be deserving of you returning the favour, making it much easier for you to hand over your money. Again, this is an asymmetrical transaction as what you give them is worth much more than what they initially give you.
Traditional sales was very much an outbound process. Hundreds of people would sit in call centres phoning potential customers and try to convince them to buy their product. In modern times, with the advent of cheap and easy information about a product and the general dislike of pushy salespeople, the process of getting a customer to buy your product has moved towards a heavier focus on marketing and inbound sales. Inbound sales is the idea that a company provides a customer with valuable information about a product or service and pulls the customer towards them and the sale rather than pushing them into buying their product. This information could be a blog post that shares a valuable insight. It could be a free video taster course, a free consultation or a free quote. These methods help build trust with the customer and help them feel that it is them making the decisions. The most important thing though is that with inbound sales you are doing a favour for the customer. The uncomfortable, unconscious, feeling of indebtedness will be sparked and the customer will be more likely to buy from that company or person in the future.
Go forth and do favours
Hopefully, the underlying psychology behind the urge to reciprocate is now a little clearer. You should start noticing evidence of it everywhere. You should also be able to identify new ways to build and market a product you are building that will leverage this quirk of human psychology.
Instead of defaulting to using a freemium model in your app because everyone else is, you will begin to be able to identify new ways to leverage the human urge to reciprocate to increase engagement. Instead of reading endless business and marketing books for a new technique to increase your customer base, you will be able to come up with unique methods and techniques yourself.
This understanding isn’t just useful for marketing purposes, it should also help in your day to day life. You should be better able to identify when you are deciding to buy or do something, not out of your true desire to make the decision but because of an indescribable pull to return a favour.
