Reciprocity

The psychology of legal relations Go Premium Index — Click ᐅ to expand: Psychology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

The idea is if you receive a gratuity — even a tatty flower you didn’t want, pressed on you by a glassy-eyed hippy when you least needed a free fricking flower, struggling through arrivals with three suitcases and a rolled-up Turkish carpet your spouse bought on impulse — you still feel morally obliged to reciprocate somehow. If you are in the middle of a sales pitch, the obvious way of doing that is buy buying the product.

There are two other dimensions to this worth considering.

Investment: The first is Rory Sutherland’s observation that signalling one’s investment in a prospective relationship — by going to trouble and expense to commence that relationship — increases your “target”’s disposition to engage in that relationship. You have shown you obviously care about them and their relationship. It is a markup of your commitment and intent to fidelity. It is a display of trust.

So, to invite your wedding guests with a thick embossed card rather than by means of a group WhatsApp message is to signal that you have gone to great trouble and expense to even invite them, making them feel valued and wanted and, perhaps, someone obliged to at least respond, and even attend.

Obligation: The second is David Graeber’s observation that an ongoing relationship involves a running series of undischarged mutual obligations. Those in a deep relationship give freely to each other without account or expectation of exact recompense. Those who provide services only against an expectation of full payment have shallow relationships, since upon discharge of that payment either party can dissolve the relationship finally, without notice and without fear of offence or retribution. It’s just business.

Perhaps, we wonder, some of the rituals we go through when we start our business relationships have this kind of profile. Is that why we persist with lengthy legal negotiations? To be sure, sending a hostile 40-page screed to your client’s legal team and having them tear it to shreds is an unusual way of building trust — but is that how our courting ritual began?

If that is right, then is the instinct to simpify and agree basic fair terms misplaced? If we just sign an NDA without question, are we showing a lack of investment? Is this somehow rude?

It seems an unintuitive idea, but perhaps the germ of truth in it is this: look for better means of indicating commitment. Make other sacrifices, that are