── ── Strategy

Reciprocity

The rule of reciprocity — if someone gives you something, you owe them something back — recurs across virtually every documented human culture (Mauss 1925; Gouldner 1960). The rule operates below deliberation, scales asymmetrically, and fires even when the favor was unrequested or from someone you dislike. Regan (1971): a 10¢ Coke produced ~50¢ in compliance, and liking stopped predicting…

How it works

1. Name the favor. What exactly is being given? Be specific — vague favors cannot be analyzed. 2. Estimate cost to giver. Real dollars, time, risk. Pull is proportional to perceived cost to giver, not value to you. 3. Estimate value to you. The gap between cost and value is where calibration goes wrong. 4. Identify the eventual ask. What does the giver want — now or later? If you can't articulate it, either there isn't one (analysis stops) or the install is still being staged. 5. Run the counterfactual. Would you say yes if asked directly, absent the gift? If yes — install is benign. If no — the rule is converting a "no" into a "yes." Decline the install, not the eventual ask. 6. Check for door-in-the-face. Large ask → decline → smaller ask → you feel pulled to match the concession. Naming it weakens the pull. 7. Decide: accept and reciprocate at par / decline up front / accept with explicit frame reset / accept then evaluate the ask on its own merits in writing. 8. Audit cumulative install. Analyze the whole relationship, not just the latest favor — especially in regulated professions.

When to use it

• someone is being unexpectedly generous before making a request
• you're deciding whether to accept a gift, free sample, or unsolicited concession
• you're designing a sales or fundraising sequence and want to give first
• a negotiation counterpart just retreated from an extreme position and you feel pulled to match
• you're asking "why do they keep buying me lunch?" or "should I send a gift first?"

Worked example

Dennis Regan's Coke Experiment, Cornell, 1971

The clearest piece of primary-source evidence on reciprocity comes from a single experiment run by social psychologist Dennis T. Regan at Cornell University, published as "Effects of a Favor and Liking on Compliance" in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 6, November 1971, pp. 627–639. Half a century later, no other experimental result has produced as clean a separation of reciprocation from liking, and no other study has been cited more often by influence researchers (including Robert Cialdini) as the foundational empirical…