When the waiter warmly brings you drinks and recommends something for you. Do you keep smiling but hope "leave me alone"?

When friends have arranged a birthday party for you intimately, you are moved by the friendship, whilst worrying about how to repay the kindness?

Recently, Prof. ZHOU Xinyue, Director of the Department of Marketing, School of Management, and her doctoral student XIONG Xiling published a paper entitled “Reciprocity anxiety: Individual differences in feeling discomfort in reciprocity situations” in the Journal of Economic Psychology. They found that different people have different feelings about reciprocity, and these differences will directly affect business when applying the principle of reciprocity to sales promotion on customers.

What we call "debt of gratitude" is actually the "principle of reciprocity", extensively studied by economists and psychologists. It is an unspoken rule in interpersonal communication that benefits received from others should be repaid in an equivalent way, which is an important cornerstone of human cooperation. But some people are anxious about such debt. To take an extreme example, in The Godfather, a mafia refuses money but helps the funeral home owner s daughter to revenge. The shopkeeper didnt want to accept it which is understandable, given that he was a mafia, and once he accepted any of his benefits, he was bound by “the principle of reciprocity”. When the other person needs you, you must take responsibility, and what they need you to do, is probably illegal. So, when he accepted the friendship with a trembling kiss on the godfathers hand, it was clear that he was anxious about the debt he would have to pay. But not everyone is so uncomfortable. Singer Johnny Fontane, for example, relishes the godfathers bounty.

Prof. Zhou and her research team found that people’s feelings about reciprocal relationships vary from person to person, and can be high or low. Previous research has shown that people feel obligated to give back and uncomfortable when receiving favors. This discomfort may come from two aspects: on the one hand, the sense of obligation partly restricts freedom and makes people feel “kidnapped by morality”; On the other hand, the burden of giving back maybe not bearable and then lower self-esteem. Therefore, Prof. ZHOUs team hypothesized that such uncomfortable feelings might cause people to feel anxious about the reciprocal relationship itself and further influence their attitudes and behaviors towards the reciprocal relationship. Predictably, the higher the reciprocity anxiety, the less likely people were to accept favors or even to be grateful for it.

To validate the relevant conjectures, the researchers first compiled a “reciprocity anxiety” scale to measure differences in attitudes and perceptions of different people after receiving favors. This scale is mainly for negative feelings. As a result, the higher the participants reciprocity anxiety, the lower the willingness to accept the coupon, and the higher the willingness to order the dessert that the waiter recommended. This shows that participants with high reciprocity anxiety will try to avoid the relationship that needs their own feedback. On the other hand, after this relationship is established passively, they hope to complete the feedback as soon as possible to relieve the anxiety. So, what kind of consequences might it bring if a merchant wants to establish a reciprocal relationship? The researchers conducted a second study for this purpose.

The results showed that in the case of the same high reciprocity anxiety, the experimental group participants had lower consumer satisfaction, lower willingness to come again and recommend than the participants in the control group. This is consistent with the researchers prediction: If a person is anxious about reciprocal relationships, forcing them to establish such a relationship may not achieve the expected return or even the opposite. It is better to let it go. In Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, the principle of reciprocity is used to convince and market, but this recent study reminds us that when applying the classics, we also need to pay attention to the theoretical boundary conditions. For some people with high reciprocity anxiety, it is better not to reluctantly establish a mutually beneficial relationship with them.