Re: Ch. 3 - Reciprocity with a Vengeance
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 12:26 pm
George Costanza gets caught with his hand in the tip jar . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svWjtDhGQFg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svWjtDhGQFg
Quality books. Great conversations.
https://www.booktalk.org/
geo wrote:from Haidt's book . . .
What would you do if you received a Christmas card from a complete stranger? This actually happened in a study in which a psychologist sent Christmas cards to people at random. The great majority sent him a card in return.8 In his insightful book Influence,9 Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University cites this and other studies as evidence that people have a mindless, automatic reciprocity reflex. Like other animals, we will perform certain behaviors when the world presents us with certain patterns of input. A baby herring gull, seeing a red spot on its mother’s beak, pecks at it automatically, and out comes regurgitated food. The baby gull will peck just as vigorously at a red spot painted on the end of a pencil. A cat stalks a mouse using the same low-down, wiggle-close-then-pounce technique used by cats around the world. The cat uses the same technique to attack a string trailing a ball of yarn because the string accidentally activates the cat’s mouse-tail-detector module. Cialdini sees human reciprocity as a similar ethological reflex: a person receives a favor from an acquaintance and wants to repay the favor. The person will even repay an empty favor from a stranger, such as the receipt of a worthless Christmas card.
geo wrote:Aha! Ant, you hypocrite! You're just trying to make your Monday work environment more pleasant!ant wrote:My intention was to spread some good will around a bunch of Monday morning sourpusses
Seriously though the next chapter in Haidt's book deals with hypocrisy.
What's the "senseless beauty part'?DWill wrote:Ant's example is interesting. He's doing what so many bumper stickers have told us to do--practice random acts of kindness (I don't know if he also covers the senseless beauty part). Could a piece of the reaction he gets be based on our culture in this particular moment in history? Sometimes we assume universality when the phenomenon is culture-based.
What he does definitely places a seeming burden on the recipient to reciprocate, so that could be why the reaction isn't joyful. If he told his coworkers, "Hey, I just found a bunch of these gift cards on the street! Have one", the sense of obligation would be less.
With family and friends, the rules are more relaxed, fortunately. We don't tend to worry so much about the running score.