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normally tell us when compliance with a request is likely to be correct and beneficial. Each of these trigger features for compliance can be used like a weapon (of influence) to stimulate people to agree to requests.
    Study Questions
    Content Mastery
     
What are fixed-action patterns among animals? How are they similar to some types of human functioning? How are they different?
What makes automatic responding in humans so attractive? So dangerous?
    Critical Thinking
     
Suppose you were an attorney representing a woman who broke her leg in a department store and was suing the store for $100,000 in damages. Knowing only what you do about perceptual contrast, what could you do during the trial to make the jury see $100,000 as a reasonable, even small, award?
The charity request card in Figure 1.2 seems rather ordinary except for the odd sequencing of the donation request amounts. Explain why, according to the contrast principle, placing the smallest donation figure between two larger figures is an effective tactic to prompt more and larger donations.
What points do the following quotes make about the dangers of click-whirr responding?
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Albert Einstein “The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are sometimes right.” Winston Churchill
How does the photograph that opens this chapter reflect the topic of the chapter?
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    Figure 1.2 Charity Request Appeal
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Chapter 2
Reciprocation
The Old Give and Take . . .and Take
     
Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill.
    –Ralph Waldo Emerson

    S EVERAL YEARS AGO, A UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR TRIED A LITTLE experiment. He sent Christmas cards to a sample of perfect strangers. Although he expected some reaction, the response he received was amazing—holiday cards addressed to him came pouring back from people who had never met nor heard of him. The great majority of those who returned cards never inquired into the identity of the unknown professor. They received his holiday greeting card, click , and whirr , they automatically sent cards in return (Kunz & Woolcott, 1976).
    While small in scope, this study shows the action of one of the most potent of the weapons of influence around us—the rule of reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us. If a woman does us a favor, we should do her one in return; if a man sends us a birthday present, we should remember his birthday with a gift of our own; if a couple invites us to a party, we should be sure to invite them to one of ours. By virtue of the reciprocity rule, then, we are obligated to the future repayment of favors, gifts, invitations, and the like. So typical is it for indebtedness to accompany the receipt of such things that a phrase like “much obliged” has become a synonym for “thank you,” not only in the English language but in others as well (such as with the Portuguese term “obrigado”). The future reach of the obligation is nicely connoted in a Japanese word for thank you, “sumimasen,” which means “this will not end” in its literal form.
    The impressive aspect of reciprocation with its accompanying sense of obligation is its pervasiveness in human culture. It is so widespread that, after intensive study, Alvin Gouldner (1960), along with other sociologists, report that all human societies subscribe to the rule. 1 Within each society it seems pervasive also; it permeates exchanges of every kind. Indeed, it may well be that a developed system of indebtedness flowing from the rule of reciprocation is a unique property of human culture. The noted archaeologist Richard Leakey ascribes the essence of what makes us human to the reciprocity system. He claims that we are human because our ancestors learned to share food and skills “in an honored network of obligation” (Leakey & Lewin, 1978). Cultural anthropologists view this “web of indebtedness” as a unique adaptive