What is the Law of Reciprocity? According to a social psychologist, it is the feeling of obligation… the obligation of returning a favour.
Have you returned a favour recently? Why did you do it? Also, how did you feel while you were deciding on returning a helping hand?
Did you feel some sort of pull or pressing needs to return it?
My guess is you probably did.
The Law of Reciprocity
The reason why I say this is because back in 1971, Dennis Regan, a social psychologist from Cornell University, did a psychological experiment to research reciprocity.
He believed that people feel obligated to return favours and wanted to understand why.
So under the hypothesis that if a person received a positive response, they would react positively and under a negative response, they would react negatively, he created a scenario of an art-showing to test it.
Here, he invited guests (the subjects) to an art show.
There were two groups of subjects –the uncontrolled and the controlled. The uncontrolled group was given a soft drink by waiters and/or waitresses at the party while the controlled group was not.
Near the end of the night, every subject was asked to purchase raffle tickets.
And (could you guess what I’m going to say?)…the group that received a soft drink bought more raffle tickets than the other group.
Regan also wanted to see if a person’s feelings towards another would affect the powers of reciprocity.
So he handed out a survey to every guest (subject) at the end of the night.
And what he found was that liking or disliking someone didn’t affect the compulsion of returning a favour.
Criticism of The Law of Reciprocity
However, there are problems with this study or theory. It doesn’t calculate how powerful a reciprocal pull is.
When subjects bought raffle tickets and did the survey, they weren’t asked how many (or how few) tickets they bought and why they chose that amount.
If they were, then we would be able to understand why someone would overcompensate when repaying someone, or why someone would do the bare minimum (just enough to complete the task).
Applying The Law of Reciprocity to Marketing
When you take this theory and apply it to the marketing world, then you can kind of see why some businesses give away free content or products. Or why some businesses give away things to content creators for free.
It’s because when they do, they tend to get something back in return.
It could be a customer who appreciates a blogger’s free content and to reciprocate the act of goodwill, they buy merch or a course. Or it could be a content creator who receives goodies from a company that he likes.
To return the favour, he reviews the products or talks about it in his content.
In my opinion, to use this theory effectively in your marketing campaigns, you need to gain trust –you need to create a community that appreciates you and your content.
Then, after a few of these interactions (them reading your material and signing up for your e-mail, for instance), you can ask them for a favour (or to return it).
So that’s the basics of the law of reciprocity.