Reciprocity — It’s Not Just Arithmetic

I first found out about Dr. Cialdini and his work through a TED talk.

You know TED, don’t you?  If not, you’ll stop and browse that wondrous site for a good long time while following up my included link.

Plowing through the internet I learned about his company’s seminars on “the science of persuasion” and it is not hard to find his six principles of “the science of persuasion.”

Reciprocity is far and away my favorite of the six.

He seems to have gone at least in part a route I would like to travel, from academic to purveyor of lessons learned from scientific research.

Of course my field is psychiatry/medicine and his seems to be business.  I mean, business has some laws that require answering to, but medicine wins hands down for regulations and rules and the resultant insuperable gulf between truths revealed by science and the practice of medicine. I liked the idea of reciprocity long before he used the word, though.

I first heard of the idea somewhere around fourth grade while learning fractions.  At first, the humble student will dutifully memorize the concept that when you have that simple and delightfully accurate depiction of a fraction as two numbers separated by a horizontal line, you  know the “reciprocal” is what you get when the one on top switches places with the one on the bottom.

Then you see that they “multiply out” to one, as any number with a horizontal line must be “one” when it sits on top of itself.

But wait, there’s more.

This means that when a reciprocal (number with vertical places flipped from its counterpart) gets bigger, its counterpart gets smaller.  Like an abstract version of some wild kind of seesaw.

“Influence.”  Of a fraction on its reciprocal.

But wait there is still more.

This is a useful construct, not just a theoretical seesaw.  If you want to divide something by another number, you can multiply by its reciprocal.  This seemed to me like a gift in the days of the slide rule, where any operation with numbers seemed fraught with danger and intrigue if the sought-for answer included more than three significant digits.

For those of you interested in dinosaurs, dodo birds and other extinct things, the slide rule was an “analog calculator” that everybody – even engineers and scientists – used in the days before digital pocket calculators.

Engineering and math majors at universities back in those days wore their “slip sticks” from their belt, like an old West gunslinger would wear his six-gun.

I owned my first slide rule at my prep school.  I sewed an applique of a flying bluebird onto the felt sheath I made for it, and attached two belt loops to the top, so I could wear it hanging from a belt, since I could not put it in my back pocket like the guys did.  The only problem was that I was a “chubbette” and belt wearing was not a realistic alternative.

Wait, there is even more.

The notion of “reciprocity,” in that amusing form of abstraction which I claim as my own, seems to relate to Newtonian Mechanics. Newtonian Mechanics is absolutely wonderful stuff that describes the absolute truth of how forces and masses and such interact, unless, of course, they are either way too teency – sub-atomic particles — or way too humongous – massive stars and the distances between them.

I mean, although at some point an apple may have fallen on his head – but probably not — it took some real brains powered by more than that to come up with the laws of Newtonian physics.

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” is a really fancy kind of reciprocity.  I mean these actions include forces and masses and accelerations and such.  But nothing stands unchanged.  Nothing is immutable.  Everything, but everything, makes something happen.

I have always believed that absolute truth exists.  Scientific truth.  Most of the people I know who believe in Scientific truth also worship with their families on Sundays and Saturdays.  (Christians, Seventh day Adventists, and Jews) although I am pretty sure there are folks who celebrate at other times I don’t know about and that religious belief is strictly optional.

No needless fighting will be tolerated, here or anywhere.

What we have here when we talk about reciprocity, is nothing less than a single rule that seems to cover mathematical and physical as well as human systems, at least the only such rule I can think of at this minute.

I am nothing less than delighted to slip back into the sphere of human behavior, which is where I live.

When someone does something to or for or at someone else, that someone else is not going to sit there immutable.

No sirree!

That person is going to change.  It may or may not be visible, but they will change. Promise.

There is a negative side to this, but I avoid negative sides of things, so I am going to try to make short work of it.

The negative side of this is the revenge motive.    This covers so many movies related to every imaginary subculture that it is hard to think of one not involved — cowboys, the mafia, and spacemen and pirates come to mind.

“I need to kill the man who killed my father” is a male mantra, the close associate of an idealistic fantasy where male humans take justice into their own hands.

The best we can hope for here is repressed rage channeled into some good deed.

The news that delights me no end is that for an act of kindness there is a change in the person who receives that act, too.  It would be very nice if it were an equal and opposite act of kindness, but it is far from explicit that such things happen.  This would be sheer delight, a sort of idealized hippie-world of contagious joy.

We aren’t there. Or – as Clare Boothe Luce so aptly put it – “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Feelings certainly exist, but they can be repressed, diminished, or totally submerged in a world view that does not believe in reciprocation of such things.

Yet such feelings exist, and may be translated into action in significant ways.

Curiously enough, a powerful argument in favor of these forces comes from a totally unrelated TED talk which I have seen recently (guess what I have been watching, for these talks are a good diet for this brain) by Amanda Palmer, musician.

Now I didn’t know this woman or her music from anything before hearing the talk.  I know only that she described it as if it were some sort of an “acquired taste” and not for everyone.

From couch surfing to crowd funding, this woman seems to have lived, handsomely and well in several instances, on the “kindness of strangers,” like Blanche DuBois in the wonderful Tennessee Williams play, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

One big difference — the audience for any kind of music — well, they are not really “strangers.”  If composers and performers have any kind of competence at all, there is a bond with the audience.

Depending on the paradigm chosen it is somewhere between and may include anything from recovered old memories to microcircuits in the brain.  But it is there and people are having “reciprocation” responses to this woman’s music.  They are financial; she lives by them.

They range from contributions to her crowd funding to someone walking up to her, telling they “burned” a copy of her CD from a friend and putting ten dollars in her hand.

She suggests we “let” people simply pay for the music that they want, with the implication that most of them, enough of them, will that this woman and her music group will do just fine.

I don’t know that she even knew or cared that what she was really saying was “let’s rely on science and life will work itself out.”

This is certainly a better response than “let’s make more rules,” which is the average American response to things not going exactly the way people want them to. Like making newer and more detailed rules for everything from FDA related behaviors to anything lawyers deal with.

Especially like learning that our students are not as clever as those of other countries and setting standards instead of making teaching more effective.

Back to the good Dr. Cialdini, a man teaching people the “science of influence.”  One really good part of his cleverness is teaching people something they want to learn.

Even the title “science of influence” has a kind of Dale Carnegie feel.  This idea has been around for a while and sold effectively in many ways.

People really want to influence other people.  I am not writing this off as a (predominantly male) power trip, although I have seen all too many such instances.

During my psychiatric residency, I did the trek — in the days when I drove myself — from Wichita to Kansas City to attend a seminar in the (then fairly young and recently codified) science of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming).  I went to this (pricey, for a resident) seminar with a sincere desire to increase my power as a psychiatrist.

Naive me  — I was shocked when I learned that I was only one of two mental health people there.  The others were selling things, usually bigger price-tag things like cars or real estate.  Their idea of influence was, quite simply, to get someone else to fork over money for what they had.

The theory is — you give someone else a gift, they want to give you a gift back.

Dr. Cialdini used the example of getting a candy with your bill at the end of a restaurant meal.  This is done apparently to increase the size of the tip.

The waiter or waitress does something nice for you and you feel strangely “compelled” to do something for them.

I know damned well the waiter or waitress is unlikely to buy or choose to give the candies on their own.  I mean, they are usually, at least where we eat, taken from a poorly hidden or even not hidden bowl near the register.

Cialdini showed that giving two candies increased the tip by a relatively small percentage.  When the waiter or waitress suddenly turned and said something to the effect of “take a couple candies — you’re nice people,” both the relative surprise and personalization of the gesture made the tips increase even more.

Waiters and waitresses do a lot to earn their tips.

My first “side” job during medical school was serving-girl at a cafe.  I thought (and still do) that I was so grossly inept I deserved a tip for not spilling things.  Apt wait-people, who do things like refill your drink when you first think of it and before you say anything, obviously deserve more.

As a guest, I cannot deny there is a bit of a feeling of being manipulated to increase the tip.  I can accept it because I know the jobs of folks so employed to be pretty difficult and low-paying, and these workers are basically pretty decent honest folks.

Besides, most other people are probably more likely to enjoy the candies than I am.

I love reciprocity because deep down I still believe most people are basically good.

So did another Jewish girl a long time ago.

Anne Frank said in her famous diary that she believed most people were basically good, in a time and place when it was a lot harder to believe that.

I love reciprocity because it is a force that can impact on personal character.  It can induce those who contribute to society to make more and better contributions, and maybe even to become better people.

Darwinian evolution is unlikely to uplift human character at this point, when the population is diverse and meandering.

Reciprocity just might.