by Adam Grant
But perhaps it was the people who were already conserving electricity in each neighborhood who responded most visibly, picking up the slack for the electricity takers. To find out whether sharing information about their neighbors’ conservation efforts could motivate conservation among people who were consuming high levels of electricity, Cialdini’s team ran another experiment with nearly three hundred households in California. This time, they gave residents door hangers that provided feedback on how their electricity consumption compared with similar households in their neighborhood over the past week or two. These door hangers provided feedback on whether residents were consuming less (giving) or more (taking) than their neighbors.
Over the next few weeks, the electricity takers significantly reduced their energy consumption, by an average of 1.22 kilowatt-hours per day. Seeing that they were taking more than the average in their neighborhood motivated them to match the average, decreasing their energy consumption.* But this only works when people are compared with their neighbors. As Cialdini’s team explains:
The key factor was which other people—other Californians, other people in their city, or other residents in their specific community. Consistent with the idea that people are most influenced by similar others, the power of social norms grew stronger the closer and more similar the group was to the residents: The decision to conserve was most powerfully influenced by those people who were most similar to the decision makers—the residents of their own community.
Inspired by this evidence, the company Opower sent home energy report letters to 600,000 households, randomly assigning about half of them to see their energy use in comparison with that of their neighbors. Once again, it was the takers—those consuming the most—who conserved the most after seeing how much they were taking. Overall, just showing people how they were doing relative to the local norm caused a dramatic improvement in energy conservation. The amount of energy saved by this feedback was equivalent to the amount of energy that would be saved if the price of electricity increased by up to 28 percent.
People often take because they don’t realize that they’re deviating from the norm. In these situations, showing them the norm is often enough to motivate them to give—especially if they have matcher instincts. Part of the beauty of Freecycle is that members have constant access to the norm. Every time a member offers to give something away, it’s transparent: others can see how frequent giving is, and they want to follow suit. Because Freecycle is organized in local communities, members are seeing giving by their neighbors, which provides feedback on how their own giving stacks up relative to the local norm. Whether people tend to be givers, takers, or matchers, they don’t want to violate the standards set by their neighbors, so they match.
Today, according to Yahoo!, only two environmental terms in the world are searched more often than Freecycle: global warming and recycling. By the summer of 2012, Freecycle had more than nine million members in over 110 countries, expanding at a rate of eight thousand members every week. Many people still join with a taker mentality, hoping to get as much free stuff as possible. But receiving benefits from a group of local citizens who serve as role models for small acts of giving continues to create a common identity in Freecycle communities, nudging many members in the giver direction. Together, the nine million Freecycle members give away more than thirty thousand items a day weighing nearly a thousand tons. If you piled together the goods given away in the past year, they’d be fourteen times taller than Mount Everest. As Charles Darwin once wrote, a tribe with many people acting like givers, who “were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”
When I learned about the success of Freecycle, I began to wonder if these principles could play out in everyday life, in an organization without an environmental focus. What would it take to create and sustain a giving system in a company or a school?
The Reciprocity Ring
When I joined the faculty at Wharton, the world’s oldest collegiate business school, I decided to try a giving experiment in my classroom. I announced that we would be running an exercise called the Reciprocity Ring, which was developed by University of Michigan sociologist Wayne Baker and his wife Cheryl at Humax. Each student would make a request to the class, and the rest of the class would try to use their knowledge, resources, and connections to help fulfill the request. The request could be anything meaningful in their professional or personal lives, ranging from job leads to travel tips.
In a matter of minutes, I was facing a line of students—some cynical, others anxious. One student pronounced that the exercise wouldn’t work, because there aren’t any givers at Wharton: givers study medicine or social work, not business. Another admitted that he would love advice from more experienced peers on strengthening his candidacy for consulting jobs, but he knew they wouldn’t help him, since they were competing with him for these positions.
Soon, these students watched in disbelief as their peers began to use their networks to help one another. A junior named Alex announced that he loved amusement parks, and he came to Wharton in the hopes of one day running Six Flags. He wasn’t sure how to get started—could anyone help him break into the industry? A classmate, Andrew, raised his hand and said he had a weak tie to the former CEO of Six Flags. Andrew went out on a limb to connect them, and a few weeks later, Alex received invaluable career advice from the ex-CEO. A senior named Michelle confided that she had a friend whose growth was stunted due to health problems, and couldn’t find clothes that fit. A fellow senior, Jessica, had an uncle in the fashion business, and she contacted him for help. Three months later, custom garments arrived at the doorstep of Michelle’s friend.
Wayne Baker has led Reciprocity Rings at many companies, from GM to Bristol-Myers Squibb. Oftentimes, he brings leaders and managers together from competing companies in the same industry and invites them to make requests and help one another. In one session, a pharmaceutical executive was about to pay an outside vendor $50,000 to synthesize a strain of the PCS alkaloid. The executive asked if anyone could help find a cheaper alternative. One of the group members happened to have slack capacity in his lab, and was able to do it for free.
The Reciprocity Ring can be an extremely powerful experience. Bud Ahearn, a group president at CH2M HILL, noted that leaders in his company “are strong endorsers, not only because of the hundreds of thousands of annual dollar value, but because of the remarkable potential to advance the quality of our ‘whole’ lives.” Baker has asked executives to estimate the dollar value and time saved in participating for two and a half hours. Thirty people in an engineering and architectural consulting firm estimated savings exceeding $250,000 and fifty days. Fifteen people in a global pharmaceutical firm estimated savings of more than $90,000 and sixty-seven days.
Personally, after running the Reciprocity Ring with leaders, managers, and employees from companies such as IBM, Citigroup, Estée Lauder, UPS, Novartis, and Boeing, I’ve been amazed by the requests that have been fulfilled—from landing a coveted job at Google to finding a mentor to receiving autographed memorabilia from a child’s favorite professional football player. But before this happens, just as my Wharton students did, many participants question whether others will actually give them the help that they need. Each time, I respond by asking whether they might be underestimating the givers in their midst.
In a study by researchers Frank Flynn and Vanessa Bohns, people learned that they would be approaching strangers in New York City and asking them to a fill out a survey. The participants estimated that only one out of every four people would say yes. In reality, when the participants went out and asked, one out of every two said yes. In another study in New York City, when participants approached strangers and asked them to borrow a cell phone, they expected 30 percent to say yes, but 48 percent did. When people approached strangers, said they were lost and ask
ed to be walked to a nearby gym, they expected 14 percent to do it, but 43 percent did. And when people needed to raise thousands of dollars for charity, they expected that they would need to solicit donations from an average of 210 people to meet their fund-raising goals, anticipating an average donation under $50. They actually hit their goals after approaching half as many people—on average, it only required 122 people, whose donations were over $60 each.
Why do we underestimate the number of people who are willing to give? According to Flynn and Bohns, when we try to predict others’ reactions, we focus on the costs of saying yes, overlooking the costs of saying no. It’s uncomfortable, guilt-provoking, and embarrassing to turn down a small request for help. And psychological research points to another factor—equally powerful, and deeply rooted in American culture—that causes people to believe there aren’t many givers around them.
Workplaces and schools are often designed to be zero-sum environments, with forced rankings and required grading curves that pit group members against one another in win-lose contests. In these settings, it’s only natural to assume that peers will lean in the taker direction, so people hold back on giving. This reduces the actual amount of giving that occurs, leading people to underestimate the number of people who are interested in giving. Over time, because giving appears to be uncommon, people with giver values begin to feel that they’re in the minority.
As a result, even when they do engage in giving behaviors, people worry that they’ll isolate themselves socially if they violate the norm, so they disguise their giving behind purely self-interested motives. As early as 1835, after visiting the United States from France, the social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that Americans “enjoy explaining almost every act of their lives on the principle of self-interest.” He saw Americans “help one another” and “freely give part of their time and wealth for the good of the state,” but was struck by the fact that “Americans are hardly prepared to admit” that these acts were driven by a genuine desire to help others. “I think that in this way they often do themselves less than justice,” he wrote. A century and a half later, the Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow interviewed a wide range of Americans who chose helping professions, from cardiologists to rescue workers. When he asked them to explain why they did good deeds, they referenced self-interested reasons, such as “I liked the people I was working with” or “It gets me out of the house.” They didn’t want to admit that they were genuinely helpful, kind, generous, caring, or compassionate. “We have social norms against sounding too charitable,” Wuthnow writes, such that “we call people who go around acting too charitable ‘bleeding hearts,’ ‘do-gooders.’”
In my experience, this is what happens in many businesses and universities: plenty of people hold giver values, but suppress or disguise them under the mistaken assumption that their peers don’t share these values. As the psychologists David Krech and Richard Crutchfield explained many years ago, this creates a situation where “no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes.” Consider a 2011 survey of Harvard freshmen: they consistently reported that compassion was one of their top values, but near the bottom of Harvard’s values. If many people personally believe in giving, but assume that others don’t, the whole norm in a group or a company can shift away from giving. “Ideas can have profound effects even when they are false—when they are nothing more than ideology,” writes the psychologist Barry Schwartz. “These effects can arise because sometimes when people act on the basis of ideology, they inadvertently arrange the very conditions that bring reality into correspondence with the ideology.” When people assume that others aren’t givers, they act and speak in ways that discourage others from giving, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As a structured form of giving, the Reciprocity Ring is designed to disrupt this self-fulfilling prophecy. The first step is to make sure that people ask for help. Research shows that at work, the vast majority of giving that occurs between people is in response to direct requests for help. In one study, managers described times when they gave and received help. Of all the giving exchanges that occurred, roughly 90 percent were initiated by the recipient asking for help. Yet when we have a need, we’re often reluctant to ask for help. Much of the time, we’re embarrassed: we don’t want to look incompetent or needy, and we don’t want to burden others. As one Wharton dean explains, “The students call it Game Face: they feel pressured to look successful all the time. There can’t be any chinks in their armor, and opening up would make them vulnerable.”
In the Reciprocity Ring, because everyone is making a request, there’s little reason to be embarrassed. By making requests explicit and specific, participants provide potential givers with clear direction about how to contribute effectively. As in Freecycle, the Reciprocity Ring often starts with givers stepping up as role models for contributions. But in every Reciprocity Ring, there are likely to be many matchers and some people who prefer to operate as takers. For a generalized giving system to achieve sustainable effectiveness, as in Freecycle, these matchers and takers need to contribute. Otherwise, the givers will end up helping everyone while receiving little in return, placing themselves at risk for getting burned or burning out. Do matchers and takers step up?
Because people often present meaningful requests in Reciprocity Rings, many matchers are drawn in by empathy. When I heard a powerful CEO’s voice tremble as he sought advice and connections to fight a rare form of cancer, the empathy in the room was palpable. “I was surprised by how much I wanted to help,” one financial services executive confides. “My job requires me to be very task-focused and financially oriented. I didn’t expect to care that much, especially about a stranger I’d never met. But I really felt for his need, and wanted to do whatever I could to contribute and fulfill his request.”
Even when they don’t empathize, matchers still end up making plenty of contributions. It’s very difficult to act like a pure matcher in the Reciprocity Ring, since it’s unlikely that the people you help will be the same people who can help fulfill your request. So the easiest way to be a matcher is to try to contribute the same amount that other people do. The Reciprocity Ring creates a miniature version of Panda Adam Rifkin’s network: participants are encouraged to do five-minute favors for anyone else in the group. To make sure that every request is granted, participants need to make multiple contributions, even to people who haven’t helped them directly. By giving more than they take, participants amplify the odds that everyone in the group will have their requests fulfilled, much like Panda Adam setting a pay-it-forward norm in his network.
But what about the takers? Many audiences are concerned that takers will capitalize on the opportunity to get help without contributing in return. To examine this risk, Wayne Baker and I surveyed more than a hundred people about their giver and taker values. Then they participated in the Reciprocity Ring, and we counted the number of contributions they made. As expected, the givers made significantly more contributions than the takers. The givers averaged four contributions each.
Surprisingly, though, the takers were still quite generous, averaging three contributions each. Despite valuing power and achievement far more than helping others, the takers gave three times more than they got. The Reciprocity Ring created a context that encouraged takers to act like givers, and the key lies in making giving public. Takers know that in a public setting, they’ll gain reputational benefits for being generous in sharing their knowledge, resources, and connections. If they don’t contribute, they look stingy and selfish, and they won’t get much help with their own requests. “Being altruistic is often seen as ‘good,’ and being greedy or selfish is not,” writes Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely with two colleagues, so giving is “a way to signal to others that one is good.”
Research shows that givers usually contribute regardless of whether it’s public or private, but takers are more likely to contribute when it’s public. In one study, when
others could see their results, takers contributed a large number of ideas during brainstorming. But when their results were hidden, takers added less value. Other studies reveal that takers go green to be seen: they prefer luxurious products over green products when their decisions are private, but shift to green products when their decisions are public, hoping to earn status for protecting the environment. I saw a similar trend among Wharton students: each week in class, I opened the floor for a few students to present requests and invited the whole class to contribute. One November morning, five students made requests, and I was stunned to see a student who had described himself as a taker offer to help four of them. Once his reputation among his peers depended on giving, he contributed. By making contributions visible, the Reciprocity Ring sets up an opportunity for people of any reciprocity style to be otherish: they can do good and look good at the same time.
Identity Shifts and Reciprocity Reversals
This raises a fundamental question: does a generalized giving system like Freecycle or the Reciprocity Ring motivate takers to become better fakers, or can it actually turn takers into givers? In some ways, I’d say the motives don’t matter: it’s the behavior itself that counts. If takers are acting in ways that benefit others, even if the motives are primarily selfish rather than selfless or otherish, they’re making contributions that sustain generalized giving as a form of exchange.
That said, if we ignore motives altogether, we overlook the risk that takers will decrease their giving as soon as they’re out of the spotlight. In one study conducted by Chinese researchers, more than three hundred bank tellers were considered for a promotion. The managers rated how frequently each bank teller had engaged in giving behaviors like helping others with heavy workloads and volunteering for tasks that weren’t required as part of their jobs. Based on giving behavior, the managers promoted seventy of the bank tellers.