Reciprocity

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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.

Obligation as a social glue that binds us

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.

Investment in a commercial relationship

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.

Perhaps some of our relationship-initiation rituals have this kind of “performative” aspect. Is the act of thrashing out an NDA some kind of show of commitment? I owe this observation to Marc Weisberger. To be sure, sending a hostile 14-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? This has implications for the OneNDA project: if an NDA is really little more than a courtship ritual, then by simplifying it and allowing parties to just sign NDAs without investment and get on with business, are we losing something? Do we turn a careful, patient trust building exercise into an an unseembly back-seat fumble?

It seems unintuitive, but perhaps the lesson is this: look for more productive ways of indicating commitment. Make other, more meaningful sacrifices, that aren’t such a drag. And that then prompts another question: isn’t that what corporate entertainment is designed to do? By rationalising it as a type of low-level corruption — as our modern day abstemious regulators tend to do — and fair enough; in a sense it is just that — are we missing a trick? This perhaps another angle where our high-modernist, ultra-rationalist approach misses the point.

See also

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini’s master work on persuasion
• OneNDA