Chapter 1

It Makes Us Feel Bad

Vanessa Bohns is a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University who, along with her frequent collaborator Frank Flynn at Stanford, has spent years studying how people ask for help—or more specifically, why they are so reluctant to do so.

Her studies often involve telling participants that they will have to approach a series of strangers and ask for a favor. These favors are generally innocuous: fill out a short survey, guide me to a particular building on campus, let me borrow your cellphone for a moment. No one is asking for large sums of money, a pint of blood, or a firstborn child. Yet, as Bohns describes it, “As soon as we tell all of our participants in these studies [what they have to do], it’s palpable the sense of fear and anxiety and dread. The whole room changes. It’s just like the worst thing we could ask these people to do.”¹

However bad you might think being in one of Bohns’s experiments would be, they’ve got nothing on the 1970s “subway studies” of Stanley Milgram. (You may remember him as the controversial psychologist whose most famous studies—requiring participants to give what they believed to be life-threatening shocks to another person—forever altered our understanding of obedience to authority. Clearly, it was not pleasant to be in any of Milgram’s experiments.)

One day, after listening to his elderly mother complain that no one on the subway had offered to give her their seat, Milgram wondered what would happen if one were to just ask a subway rider for their seat? So he recruited his graduate students to go find out. He told them to board crowded trains in New York City and ask individuals at random for their seat. The good news: 68 percent of people willingly gave up their seats upon request. The bad news: conducting the study was—to this day—among the worst, most traumatic experiences his students had had in their lifetimes. One student, Kathryn Krogh, a clinical psychologist, recalled feeling sick to her stomach the first time she approached a passenger. Another student (and former professor of mine), Maury Silver, managed to make the request only once: “I start to ask for the man’s seat. Unfortunately, I turned so white and so faint, he jumps up and puts me in the seat.”²

Milgram, a bit skeptical as to what all the fuss was about, decided to try asking for a seat on the subway himself. He was shocked at the extent of his own discomfort; it took him several attempts just to get the words out, so paralyzed was he with fear. “Taking the man’s seat, I was overwhelmed by the need to behave in a way that would justify my request,” he said. “My head sank between my knees, and I could feel my face blanching. I was not role-playing. I actually felt as if I were going to perish.”³

Although the idea of asking for even a small amount of help makes most of us horribly uncomfortable, the truth about modern work is that we rely, more than ever, on the cooperation and support of others. No one succeeds in a vacuum, whether you are in an entry-level position or have a view from the C-suite. Cross-functional teams, agile project management techniques, and matrixed or hierarchy-minimizing organizational structures mean we’re all collaborating more and having to suffer the small agony of asking people to help us on a regular basis. And I’m not just talking about getting help from your colleagues and peers; if you are a leader, you need to figure out how to elicit and coordinate helpful, supportive behavior from the people you are leading, too. Arguably, that is what management is.

Yet our reluctance to ask for help means we often don’t get the support or the resources we need. Making matters worse, our intuitions about what should make others more likely to help are often dead wrong; our fumbling, apologetic ways of asking for assistance generally make people far less likely to want to help. We hate imposing on people and then inadvertently make them feel imposed upon.

There’s an inherent paradox in asking someone for their help: while help freely and enthusiastically given makes the helper feel good, researchers have found that the emotional benefits of providing help to others disappear when people feel controlled—when they are instructed to help, when they believe that they should help, or when they feel they simply have no choice but to help.⁴

In other words, a sense of personal agency—that you are helping because you want to—is essential for reaping the psychological benefits of giving support. When you don’t genuinely want to help, there’s nothing in it for the helper except getting it over with as quickly and with as little effort as possible. And this simple fact—more than any other—is why I wanted to write this book.

None of us can go it alone. We all need people to support us, do favors, pick up our slack, and go to bat for us. And people are much more likely to help us than we realize. But in many instances, we ask for help in such a way that we make people feel controlled, rather than giving them what they need to really want to help us—and to make helping us rewarding.

Why shouldn’t the people who help you get to walk away feeling better about themselves and better about the world? In my opinion, we owe it to them. If you are going to ask someone to use their valuable time and effort on your behalf, the least you can do is to ensure that helping you leaves them better off, not worse.

But knowing how to get people to want to give you their best—and making sure they benefit as much as possible from having helped you—is not knowledge we are born with. As you’ll see in the following chapters, getting other people to eagerly do what you need in response to your request requires that you create the right environment and frame your request in such a way that others will rush gladly to your aid.

I chose to call this book Reinforcements because there are two senses of the word “reinforcement,” and each captures something really important about seeking support.

A reinforcement is generally defined as the action or process of strengthening. But Google offers these two more specific subdefinitions:

The idea of “extra personnel” required to get the job done is really the basic need I designed this book to address. Reaching your fullest potential—professionally or personally—requires you to understand how to enlist reinforcements when you need them. For many of us, “when you need them” is literally every day.

The second notion—of reinforcement as establishing a “pattern of behavior”—is the more technical sense in which psychologists tend to use the term. B. F. Skinner famously called the use of reinforcements to make particular behaviors more likely operant conditioning. And while human beings don’t react exactly the same way as the rats and pigeons Skinner studied in his laboratory, the general principle of operant conditioning—that certain consequences or rewards can make us more likely to want to engage in a particular behavior, like helping another person in need—is spot on.

This book is organized into three major chunks. Part I is a deep dive into why we generally hate asking for help. This is the first, and major, obstacle of seeking help: overcoming the almost universal dread of actually seeking it. You’ll learn why our fear of asking for help is so misguided, specifically, when and why we underestimate the likelihood of getting the support we need. You will also learn why it is fruitless to sit back and wait for people to offer to help you.

In part II, I explain the right ways to ask for help, laying out techniques you can use to not only increase the odds that people will want to help you, but allow them to feel genuinely good about doing so. We’ll cover the kinds of basic information people need from you to even make it possible for them to give high-quality assistance. You will learn the vital difference between controlled helping (when people feel, for various reasons, that they have no choice but to help you) and autonomous helping (when giving assistance feels authentic and unforced to the helper), and how helpers’ happiness and well-being are affected by engaging in each.

In part III, we will dive into why reinforcements (the people) need reinforcements (the motivators). You will see how creating a sense of “us”—offering people a way to feel good about themselves and providing them with the means to see their help “land”—provides an essential form of reinforcement for high-quality helping. If I were a Silicon Valley–type, rather than a New York social psychologist, I’d say this section of the book is about how to get help to scale—how to reinforce the helpful behavior you want to see more of, so that the people around you become more helpful without being asked.

The hard truth is that, if you aren’t getting the support you need from the people in your life, it’s usually more your own fault than you realize. That may sound harsh, but we all assume our needs and motivations are more obvious than they really are, and that what we intended to say overlaps perfectly with what we actually said. Psychologists call this “the transparency illusion,” and it’s just that: a mirage. Chances are, you’re not surrounded by unhelpful loafers—just people who have no idea that you need help or what kind of help you need. The good news? We can easily solve this problem. Armed with a little knowledge, there is hope for each of us to get the support we so critically need.

In a now-famous excerpt from a four-hour interview for the Archive of American Television, the beloved children’s programming creator Fred Rogers offered advice on how to help children understand and cope with the terrible things that sometimes happen in the world: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping … if you look for the helpers, you’ll know that there’s hope.’”

A beautiful sentiment that captures an even more beautiful truth—human beings are, much more than it often seems, wired to want to help and support one another. And their lives are immeasurably enriched by doing so.

Your Brain, in Real Pain

People will often go to great lengths to avoid having to ask for a favor or for help of any kind, even when their need is completely genuine. My father was one of the seemingly countless legions of men who would rather drive through an alligator-infested swamp than ask for directions back to the road, which made driving with him something of a liability in the days before everyone’s phone contained Google Maps. (He would invariably claim that he had not taken a wrong turn, but had “always wanted to know what was over here.”)

To understand why asking for help can feel so painful, it’s useful to take a look under the hood at how human brains are wired. You are probably familiar with phrases like “he broke my heart” and “the sting of rejection.” You may have felt that another person’s criticism felt like “a punch in the gut.” One of the most interesting insights to emerge from the still relatively new field of social neuroscience is that our brain processes social pain—discomfort arising from our interactions with others—in much the same way as it processes the physical pain of a muscle cramp or a stubbed toe. There is more truth, in other words, to those figures of speech than you might ever have realized.

Studies by UCLA social neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger have shown that the experience of both social and physical pain involves an area of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, or dACC, which has the highest density of opioid receptors—responsible for signaling pain and reward—of any region of the brain. Being rejected or treated unfairly activates the dACC just as a headache would. Eisenberger, along with her collaborator Nathan DeWall, was able to show that taking a thousand milligrams of Tylenol every day for three weeks resulted in the experience of significantly less social pain compared to a control group that took a placebo. Taking a painkiller had made the participants less sensitive to everyday rejection experiences. Evidently, you can treat your heartache and your hangover at the same time. (Why no one is marketing ibuprofen for this purpose yet, I can’t imagine.)

But why would the human brain process a breakup like a broken arm? It’s because pain—physical and social—is an important signal in our quest for survival. It alerts us that something is wrong, that we have injured either our bodies or our connections to others, both of which have been, throughout most of human history, literally essential for staying alive. As another UCLA social neuroscientist, Matt Lieberman (Eisenberger’s husband and frequent collaborator), writes in his fascinating book Social, “Love and belonging might seem like a convenience we can live without, but our biology is built to thirst for connection because it is linked to our most basic survival needs.”⁵

Human infants are born far more helpless and dependent than the offspring of other mammalian species. And adult humans, with all their cleverness, aren’t exactly physically formidable creatures compared to our primate cousins. We have always needed to band together and cooperate with other humans to make it in the world; experiencing social pain is the brain’s way of letting you know that you might be on the verge of getting tossed out of the band.

David Rock, director of the NeuroLeadership Institute, has spent years researching and writing about the specific types of social threat that can create a pain response—and all the unfortunate consequences that go with it, like diminished working memory and loss of focus—in our everyday interactions with others.⁶ He integrated the research into five major categories.

Pain from Status Threats

Status refers to your value or sense of worth relative to others. It is a measure of your standing in a group—whether or not those around you respect you. Below our awareness, our brains are engaged in constant comparison, comparing ourselves to those with whom we work and socialize. (Research suggests that people frequently give themselves status rewards by engaging in what psychologists call downward social comparison—strategically comparing yourself to someone who is worse off, so you can feel better about you.) When you feel your friends or colleagues have disrespected, contradicted, or ignored you, it creates a strong status threat.

Pain from Certainty Threats

Human beings have a strong, innate desire for prediction. We want to know what is happening around us and, even more importantly, what’s going to happen, so that we can be prepared to face it (or run away if we have to). Some of the greatest sources of stress people experience in their personal and professional lives revolve around interpersonal uncertainty of one kind or another, like the uncertainty of not knowing if your relationship with a romantic partner will last, or wondering if you will still have your job once your company merges with another.

Pain from Autonomy Threats

Along with the desire for prediction comes the desire for control. It’s obviously not enough to know what’s going to happen if you can’t actually deal with it effectively. Psychologists have long argued that the need for autonomy—for a feeling of choice and the ability to take action in keeping with that choice—is one of the basic needs that characterize all human beings. When people feel out of control, they can not only experience momentary pain, but—if the feeling goes on long enough—endure periods of debilitating depression.

Pain from Relatedness Threats

Relatedness refers to your sense of belonging and connection with others, and it is arguably one of the most powerful sources of both reward and threat in the brain. Social psychologists have long studied our sensitivity to relatedness threats, like rejection. They have found that even objectively trivial instances of rejection can have profound effects.

Take, for example, the work of psychologist Kip Williams, who used a computer game he calls “Cyberball.” Typically, in his studies, a participant will come into the lab and he will tell them that they are going to play a virtual ball-tossing game with two other online players.⁷ Their only task is to “pass” the virtual ball to one another for a period of time. But the game is rigged—in the beginning, all three players pass the ball to one another, but soon, the two online players start passing the ball back and forth only to each other, leaving the participant completely excluded.

Who cares?, you are probably thinking. It’s just a stupid game in a psych experiment, right? Wrong—participants in Williams’s studies report significant drops in feelings of relatedness, positive mood, and even self-esteem. They are very unhappy about the other two online players rejecting them, even when it could not, practically speaking, matter less. Such is the power of a relatedness threat.

Pain from Fairness Threats

Human beings are remarkably sensitive to whether or not they are treated equitably, so much so that they will willingly accept outcomes that are less positive (or downright negative) in the interest of fairness. My personal favorite example of this need for fairness in action comes from a paradigm psychologists call the ultimatum game.

In the most common version of the game, people participate in pairs and are asked to split money between them. The researcher selects one person’s name at random and makes them the money splitter, asking them to keep whatever amount of the total they choose and give the remainder to the partner. But the partner also has an important role to play—they can accept or reject the offer. If they reject the offer, no one gets any money.

From a purely rational perspective, even if the partner gets less than the money splitter, they should take it, because some money is generally better than none. But studies show that when the split is blatantly unequal (e.g., splitting 10, 9/1 instead of 5/5), the partner will almost always reject the offer, even though this means neither participant will get any money at all. When an outcome—even a positive one—seems unfair, the threat it produces can create surprising effects.

So now that you know about the five types of social threat, you have probably realized why asking for help is something we so often avoid. When you seek support from someone else, it opens up the possibility that you will experience all five kinds of social pain at the same time. By making a request of another person, many people at least unconsciously feel that they have lowered their status and invited ridicule or scorn, particularly when the help request means revealing a lack of knowledge or ability. Since you don’t know how the person will answer, you’ve lowered your sense of certainty. And since you have no choice but to accept their answer, whatever it is, you’ve surrendered some of your autonomy as well. If they say no, it can feel like a personal rejection, creating a relatedness threat. And, of course, that “no” almost certainly won’t feel very fair.

No wonder, then, that we avoid asking for help like the plague. The plague might seem less dangerous in comparison.

It Helps to Remember