Chapter 4

The Inherent Paradox in Asking for Help

About a year ago, I was helping a friend from graduate school put together a particularly complicated and intimidating IKEA bookshelf. Ever since I had proven myself decent at this sort of thing years ago, I’d been her go-to gal for furniture assembly. (Honestly, it’s not that I’m particularly handy; I’m just weirdly good at understanding poorly illustrated instructions.)

Assembling bookshelves is probably pretty low on most people’s list of “ways I enjoy helping my friends”—right below water my plants while I’m away, but still above help me move into my new apartment—and I’m no different. Yet, I eagerly agreed to her request when she phoned me, and even found myself looking forward to lending a hand on the drive over.

Many hours (and many bruises from mishandling shelves and dropping a power tool on my foot) later, we stood shoulder to shoulder, gazing proudly upon the wonder of a fully constructed SPROINK or VERBLANGT or whichever shelving system it was. My friend turned to me at this point and said, “Heidi, thank you. You are always so helpful and generous.” She meant it.

But nice as it was to hear, this statement struck me immediately as somehow wrong.

You see, I’m not always so helpful and generous. Far from it. That very morning, in fact, I had made a whole series of unhelpful and entirely selfish decisions.

First, I had turned down a request to review a submission to a scientific journal because the topic seemed boring and I didn’t want to spend the time on it, even though I know reviewing papers is a necessary part of the business of science, and despite the fact that it would probably have taken the same amount of time as the shelf assembly and been far less physically painful.

Then I chose to strategically ignore an email asking parents to volunteer to help with an after-school ice cream party for my daughter’s fourth-grade class. Because, I told myself, I had done it the year before so I should be off the hook now for several years. Plus, feeding fourth graders ice cream is a job that is both thankless and sticky.

Finally, I’d grudgingly agreed to do the laundry. I realize laundry is a mundane part of everyday adult life. However, I hate laundry about as much as it is possible for an adult human being to hate a perfectly mundane task. So I’d done it, but only after emitting a long and loud sigh, rolling my eyes so hard I’m surprised I didn’t sprain something, and muttering, “Fine, I’ll do it. But I’m not folding it.”

Having spent the first section of this book explaining why we really shouldn’t be so hesitant about asking for help, even if it does feel a bit awkward, I’m now going to do a bit of an about-face: the truth is, asking for help can be a bit tricky. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this book. As we’ll see in this chapter, although most people do have an innate desire to feel helpful, they really hate feeling compelled to help. But how can you ask someone to help without, in some sense, compelling them?

The Four Possible Responses to a Request for Help

I’ll wager that just about every morning, you send out emails asking for some form of professional favor, maybe advice on a project, or help tracking down a difficult-to-find resource, or an introduction and recommendation to a colleague. Once recipients have read your request, they are going to have one of the same four reactions, more or less.

Reaction 1: No

An explicit “No, I’m sorry I can’t help with that,” like my response to the academic journal, is the answer most of us are usually expecting to hear. However, as discussed in chapter 2, it’s actually a fairly rare response. It’s pretty hard to give a clean and untroubled no when someone asks you to do something. Bartleby the Scrivener might have been able to say, “I would prefer not to,” with ease, but the rest of us seem to struggle with it. While it’s statistically unlikely your response will be met with a clear no, it is possible.

Reaction 2: Silence

The more popular alternative seems to be to simply ignore the request until it sinks down deep enough in their inbox that recipients can pretend to themselves that they forgot to answer or never saw it in the first place, as I did with the email from my daughter’s school. (And I am appalled by how often I go with this option.) The benefit of reaction 2 is that recipients don’t experience the discomfort of saying no. The downside, of course, is that they leave you, the sender, hanging, which is almost certainly more annoying and anxiety producing. And the upshot is the same: they don’t help you.

Either reaction 1 or 2 will probably cause the recipient to feel at least a little uncomfortable, if not experience a full-blown bout of I-am-a-terrible-person.

Reaction 3: Grudging Yes

“Ugh. OK, I guess I have to … eventually” is a very popular reaction, particularly when there is really no avoiding you, the person making the request. By choosing reaction 3, the recipients of your request are able to avoid the guilt of not helping, while minimizing inconvenience to themselves and putting out as little effort as possible. Of course, the downside is that they will derive no pleasure or self-affirmation at all from helping. At best, they will feel some small relief when they can cross the favor off their to-do list.

Reaction 4: Enthusiastic Yes

“YES!” is hands-down the best reaction for all parties involved. We all know what it’s like to be genuinely delighted to be able to help someone, to feel eager and energized by the prospect of providing that help, and to willingly go above and beyond—sometimes spontaneously offering up other, even more effective ways in which we might be helpful. You’d like me to introduce you to John? Gladly! While I’m at it, would you like an introduction to Susan and Alex, too? And is anyone watering your plants while you’re away?

When people have reaction 4, they not only give their very best, but they feel their very best. They experience surges of happiness and well-being that have been well documented by decades of research. They like themselves more. And, of course, they strengthen their relationships with those to whom they give their help.

But an enthusiastic yes is actually fairly rare. If it’s so great, why don’t people have this reaction all the time?

Some psychologists focus on what they call individual differences as the primary way of explaining different behaviors. Some people have this kind of personality, so they do X, and others have this other kind of personality, so they do Y. Adam Grant’s analysis of givers and takers (mentioned in the previous chapter) would fall into this category. Chronic givers like helping (or dislike the pain of not helping) so much that they give enthusiastic yeses almost all the time, even sometimes to the point of shortchanging their own goals, desires, and needs. But they’re only 20 percent of the population.

And (as you may have noticed) human beings aren’t always consistent and predictable. Most of us do give sometimes. And not other times. So what’s different about the times we choose to give and the times we choose not to?

Social psychologists like myself tend to want to explain behavior less in terms of personality (though obviously that’s still important) and more in terms of the context or situational forces at play. When are people helpful and generous, as opposed to just minimally helpful or completely unhelpful? What motivates each of those reactions, and what kinds of rewards or incentives does a person need to elicit the most helpful, supportive behavior, not just once, but again and again?

Understanding the answers to these questions is really, really important if you want to get anywhere in this world. No one succeeds alone. Yes, everyone has certain job responsibilities or “have to’s,” so being totally uncooperative is often not an option. But people do absolutely have options when it comes to how they prioritize the work they do each day, and how much of their best effort they put into it. Your coworkers may have to help you—they may owe you a grudging yes—but they don’t have to be eager to help you. Whether or not you get an enthusiastic yes is the question, and the surprising answer is that it’s more under your control than you may realize.

The IKEA bookshelf story contains examples of many of the key elements that I’ll be returning to again and again in this part of the book. I am weirdly good at doing that sort of task. The help seeker was an old friend from an important time in my life. She expressed gratitude in a particular way. I was able to stand with her and see the results of my efforts. Each of these elements provided a type of reinforcement I needed to motivate the highest-quality help I had to offer—reinforcements that were missing from the other requests for help I received that same morning.

Having to Help versus Wanting to Help

Psychologists who study prosocial behavior have long realized that there is more than one thing going on when one person helps another—more than one potential source of motivation. Of course, true to our long-standing tradition, most of us in the field can’t quite agree on what those sources of motivation are or what to call them. Roughly speaking though, the distinctions researchers have made map onto one another well and can be boiled down to this: Are you helping because you have to or because you want to?

I Did It My Way

Human beings have psychological needs. That much is clear. How many needs, and exactly what they are, is still a matter of some debate (seriously, we argue about everything), but most psychologists agree that among these critical needs is the need for autonomy. (You may recall, in chapter 1, that autonomy is one of the five categories of social threat that activate a pain center in our brains. When we feel a lack of autonomy, it hurts.)

Autonomy is about choice and control. Specifically, it’s about choosing your own goals, activities, and experiences. It’s about feeling as if what you do is an authentic reflection of who you are—your own values and preferences. In the United States, we have expressions we frequently use to capture this notion, like being captain of your own ship and charting your own course. Or, if you prefer the more modern, less nautical version, you do you.

When we engage in a behavior because we choose to, not because we have to, we are what psychologists call intrinsically motivated. And without exaggeration, research has clearly shown over the last thirty or forty years that this type of motivation is just the best. When you are intrinsically motivated, you find greater interest and enjoyment in what you do, even when it’s challenging. You are more creative in your thinking, and you absorb more new knowledge. You are better at hanging in there even when the going gets tough. Across the board, intrinsic motivation leads to greater improvement, superior performance, and a deeper sense of satisfaction.

For example, middle schoolers who feel as if their gym teachers give them “choices and options” report liking exercise more and get more exercise in their free time.¹ People in weight-loss programs that offer the feeling of choice lose more weight.² (Similar results have been shown in programs for diabetes management, smoking cessation, alcohol treatment, and methadone maintenance.³) Students with autonomy-supportive teachers get better grades, are more creative and challenge seeking, and are more likely to stay in school.⁴ People who adhere to particular religious practices because they want to have greater well-being and life satisfaction, while those who go to a church and follow its teachings from a sense of obligation do not.⁵ Nursing home residents who can choose from a set of activities each day and can arrange their rooms according to their own liking live longer.⁶

I’m not finished. Intrinsic motivation is so magical that it can apparently do something psychologists once thought impossible. Imagine if there were something you could add to your car’s engine, so that after driving it a hundred miles, you’d end up with more gas in the tank than you started with. That would be great, right? Well, intrinsic motivation does something similar for your own personal gas tank: it can make you feel energized—rather than exhausted—by mentally taxing work.

In a fascinating set of studies, psychologists at Colorado State University gave participants a task that was particularly draining and then varied whether the next task was difficult but personally interesting, or relatively easy but nothing anyone would ever want to do. They found that people who worked on the personally interesting task put in more effort and performed much better (despite being tired) than those who worked on the have-to task, even though it was actually harder than the have-to task. In other words, experiencing intrinsic motivation restored their energy and gave them a tangible advantage.⁷

In another study, the researchers found that experiencing intrinsic motivation resulted in better performance on a subsequent task as well. In other words, you don’t just do a better job on task A because you find task A inherently interesting; you do a better job on follow-up task B because you found task A inherently interesting. The replenished energy flows into whatever you do next.

(Incidentally, each of these studies compared the effects of intrinsic motivation and good mood, and found that while people do get some replenishment of energy from being happy, they get much more from being interested in and engaged by what they do.)

I Did It Your Way

Feeling controlled, on the other hand, results in a far less effective and satisfying state of affairs. It destroys any intrinsic motivation you might have had and replaces it with the feeling that you might as well just get this over with. No one likes feeling micromanaged, obviously, but what is surprising is how even subtle forms of control can have such a strong (and negative) impact.

One of my favorite examples of the effect of feeling controlled comes from a study by intrinsic motivation researcher Mark Lepper.⁸ He and his colleagues began by studying one of the most intrinsically motivated things you can think of: preschoolers playing with magic markers. Obviously, you don’t need to tell four-year-olds to play with magic markers. You don’t need to threaten them with punishments or entice them with rewards. They just do it, because they want to. But what happens to their natural desire when you try to control it?

Lepper told some of the children he was observing that they could earn a special “Good Player Award” for drawing pictures with the magic markers, and they did so with enthusiasm, using the markers longer than the children who weren’t offered the award. That’s great, right? The award was motivating! Except actually, it wasn’t. Once Lepper gave the award and offered no new prizes, the children stopped wanting to play with the markers altogether. Their intrinsic motivation to play with the markers was completely destroyed by the reward. For them, markers became something they only played with when they got something in return. But for the kids who never got an award, markers were still something they played with because they wanted to.

Rewards aren’t the only things that can make us feel controlled. Threats, surveillance, deadlines, and other pressures have the same effect, because they make us feel as if we are no longer free to act as we wish. Which brings us to the issue at hand: What happens to the likelihood and quality of helping, when people feel as if they have to help you? What does controlled helping look like?

It’s not good.

How We Inadvertently Make People Feel Compelled to Help

Why do people sometimes feel controlled when they are asked for help? For starters, as Vanessa Bohns’s research described in chapter 2 shows, people experience significant psychological discomfort when turning down a request for help. Good people are helpful, we think to ourselves on some level, so if we choose not to help, where does that leave us? Also, rejecting another person in need creates an awkward tension that isn’t easily resolved, even when we offer apologies and justifications for the rejection. Really, slinking away quickly is your only option.

Moreover, when someone asks you for help and you even consider saying no, you know that discomfort is coming. It’s like a form of punishment. And generally speaking, when you know that a course of action will lead to punishment, and your only way of avoiding it is to give in to the request, you feel controlled.

That’s the catch-22 of asking for help: if people say yes, they might feel controlled. If they say no, they might feel like real jerks. There is clearly no winning here. And there are circumstances that make the feeling of having to help even more acute.

Can You Do Me a Favor?

Imagine that you are walking through New York City’s Penn Station—one of the city’s busiest commuter hubs—on your way to work. A college student approaches you with a clipboard in her hand. (If you knew at this point that the student was from Bohns’s research lab, I’m assuming you would use the good sense God gave you and run.)

The student asks, “Excuse me, would you fill out a questionnaire?” How do you think you would respond?

Now, what if the student asked instead, “Can you do me a favor?” And then waited until you responded (with something like “Yeah, sure, what is it?” as most people do) before asking, “Would you fill out a questionnaire?” Do you think you might respond differently?

I’m guessing right now you are thinking that there is no real difference between these two approaches, so you’d respond the same way in both cases, and you’d say no. But I’m here to tell you that you are wrong. The second version—the one that asked for and obtained commitment to a favor before revealing the request—yielded an 84 percent cooperation rate, compared to only 57 percent for the non-favor version (which is actually still impressive. People really are helpful).⁹

According to Bohns and her research coauthor Frank Flynn, asking someone to essentially precommit to a favor induces higher levels of helping. It basically ramps up the potential discomfort of saying no. After all, not only are good people helpful, but you just said you would do this person a favor. Now you are a person who goes back on their word, too. Nice going.

Right now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Hey, that sounds like a great way to get people to help me when I need them to! I’ll get them to precommit.” But be warned, this approach has a significant potential downside for you. After filling out their questionnaires, the researchers asked the New York City commuters how large a monetary gift they should receive for the trouble they went to. The people who had precommitted to a favor asked for more than twice as much money. They resented having been made to feel trapped and wanted to be compensated for their pain and suffering accordingly.

In other words, influence tactics can have trade-offs. In the short term, you may get what you want. But in the long term, there is now someone in your life who feels as if you owe them, big time. Which, ironically, may leave you feeling controlled.

You Owe Me

Reciprocity is a powerful force in human psychology. Just think of all the expressions we use in our daily lives that capture the belief that we should give what we get, and get what we give:

One of the most pervasive norms (i.e., rules of behaving that a group or society explicitly or implicitly adheres to) across all cultures is the norm of reciprocity. People are expected (and expect of themselves) to give what they receive in kind. And generally, they do.

This is driven by two influences. When someone does you a good turn, most people experience both a feeling of gratitude and sense of obligation or debt. You might assume that it’s the latter that leads to greater helping, but gratitude itself can also increase helping, even toward those who haven’t done a damn thing for you. Studies show, for example, that when people are made to feel grateful, they are not only more likely to help their benefactor, they are more likely to help perfect strangers in need of assistance. (But that effect disappears after about thirty minutes. People tend to not stay grateful, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.)¹⁰

There are actually three flavors of reciprocity, according to research by Frank Flynn.¹¹ Personal reciprocity is a kind of negotiated exchange, or barter. It’s you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours. For example, when coworkers decide to exchange work shifts, or roommates take turns doing the dishes, that’s personal reciprocity. It doesn’t usually lead to helping beyond what was explicitly negotiated; it doesn’t really produce gratitude, and the sense of obligation you might feel is satisfied by the terms of the exchange. In essence, personal reciprocity is strictly business.

Relational reciprocity is exactly what it sounds like: the kind of reciprocity we engage in in our actual relationships (with friends, romantic partners, family members, etc.). It isn’t an explicit deal. You just tend to be helpful to one another, assuming that in the future the relationship partner will support you when needed. There is no keeping score. (Unless, of course, one person repeatedly fails to provide support in return. That usually gets noticed. And it doesn’t end well.) Relational reciprocity creates both gratitude and a sense of obligation, but that sense of obligation is specific to the relationship partner only.

Collective reciprocity is a kind of generalized exchange of helping, at the level of a group. It’s when you lend a hand because you share an identity with someone. This identity could be something quite broad, like helping someone of the same race, nationality, or religion, or something very specific, like helping someone who is a fellow member of your department or your local PTA, or who plays in your bowling league.

Collective helping, like relational helping, occurs without concern for immediate return on your helping investment. You don’t expect help from that specific person in return, necessarily, but have a broader (often implicit) faith that helping someone who is similar to you in some way is good for you, because you can expect help from similar others in return when you need it.

Moreover, there is still that element of feeling just a little controlled in both relational and collective responsibility—the feeling that I ought to help my friend by watering her plants while she’s away or help my partner by giving him a lift to the airport. That I really should lend a hand to my fellow cosplay enthusiast whose car has broken down by the side of the road. (And, hey, nice Wonder Woman costume by the way. Love the Lasso of Truth.)

Which type of reciprocity is most common? Typically, the closer two people become, the more likely they are to shift from personal, explicitly negotiated exchanges—the safest form of reciprocity when you don’t know how much to trust someone—to relational or collective reciprocity, through bonds of attachment or team identity.

Of course, awkwardness can arise when two people read their reciprocity type differently. For example, when one person sees it as personal, and the other, relational, direct exchange propositions can be off-putting and cause conflict, damaging the relationship itself. I still remember when someone I thought of as a friend asked me if I would watch her cat when she went on vacation, which I was happy to do, until she offered me $100 to do it. I felt both extremely uncomfortable and just slightly insulted that she felt I would want compensation for doing her a favor. I thought we were past that, so to speak. I still watched the cat, of course, but I didn’t really take any joy in it.

And that’s the downside of inadvertently making people feel obligated to help you: while enthusiastically and freely given help confers a host of benefits on the helper, the people who give a grudging yes experience none of them. They may even start avoiding you, to avoid the pain of declining (or ignoring) your requests.

Avoidance is how we get around the dilemma of feeling controlled by other people’s requests for help. Let’s face it, this is something most of us have done at one time or another. When I was a graduate student and money was tight, I will admit to having deliberately avoided my fair share of Salvation Army Santas and school kids selling candy bars door-to-door. I have crossed the street to avoid anyone with a clipboard who looked suspiciously as if they were going to tell me about their worthy cause. To this day, I refuse all offers of assistance in stores for fear that if someone is nice to me, I will feel as if I have to buy something.

It doesn’t make you bad person; it’s just human nature. In one study, researchers told participants that they could answer a few questions about their upcoming Thanksgiving plans and be paid for doing so. They told half that, at the end, they’d offer the participants the choice between keeping the money and donating it to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. For this group, participation rates dropped by over 10 percent. When faced with a choice between keeping the money and feeling like a jerk, or giving away the money but feeling controlled, some people will choose to walk away altogether.¹²

It Helps to Remember