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By fostering a common identity and opportunities for unique self-expression, Freecycle was able to mobilize a giving system based on generalized reciprocity: you give to help others in the community, and you know that someone in the community will give to you. But Willer’s team finds that there’s a catch: such a system depends on a “critical mass of exchange benefits,” which “creates positive sentiments toward the group, sentiments that help fuel further contributions.” In other words, people only identify with a generalized giving group after they receive enough benefits to feel like the group is helping them. With Freecycle, this outcome was by no means guaranteed; after all, if the givers on the site had been overwhelmed by takers looking for a free ride, the whole thing might never have gotten off the ground. How did Freecycle accumulate that initial critical mass of giving and discourage free riding?

When Freecycle first launched, one of the early members was a ninety-eight-year-old man. He collected parts to fix up bicycles and gave them to local children. He was an “incredible role model,” Deron Beal recalls. Tucson citizens were able to identify with the man as a fellow resident. When they saw him give, he was a member of their unique community, so they felt more compelled to follow his example. New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt refers to this as
elevation
, the warm feeling of being moved by others’ acts of giving, which can “seem to push a mental ‘reset button,’ wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with . . . a sense of moral inspiration.” When elevated, Haidt and psychologist Sara Algoe write, “we feel as though we have become (for a moment) less selfish, and we want to act accordingly.”

But it was more than just common identity that made this elderly man such an elevating role model. Consider an experiment by psychologists Leif Nelson and Michael Norton, who randomly assigned people to list either ten features of a superhero or
ten features of Superman
. When invited to sign up as community service volunteers, the group that listed superhero features was nearly twice as likely to volunteer as the Superman group. Three months later, Nelson and Norton invited both groups to a meeting to kick off their volunteering. The people who had written about a superhero were four times more likely to show up than the people who had written about Superman. Thinking about a superhero three months earlier supported giving. In comparison, thinking about Superman discouraged giving. Why?

When people think about the general attributes of superheroes, they generate a list of desirable characteristics that they can relate to themselves. In the study, for example, people wrote about how superheroes are helpful and responsible, and they wanted to express these giver values, so they volunteered. But when people think specifically about Superman, what comes to mind is a set of impossible standards, like those popularized in the TV series
The Adventures of Superman:
“faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” No one can be that strong or heroic, so why bother trying?

On Freecycle, givers modeled a standard that seemed attainable. When members saw a ninety-eight-year-old man building bikes for kids, they knew they could do something too. When members saw people giving away items like clothes and old electronics, they felt it would be easy for them to do the same. The small acts of giving that started on Freecycle made it easy and acceptable for other people to give small amounts. Indeed, Cialdini finds that people donate more money to charity when the phrase “
even a penny will help
” is added to a request. Interestingly, this phrase increases the number of people who give without necessarily decreasing the amount that they give. Legitimizing small contributions draws in takers, making it difficult and embarrassing for them to say no, without dramatically reducing the amount donated by givers.

Although most people joined Freecycle to get free stuff, this doesn’t mean that taking was their primary reciprocity style. When people join a group, they look for cues about appropriate behavior. When new Freecycle members saw similar others modeling low-cost acts of giving, it became natural for them to follow suit. By making giving visible, Freecycle made it easy for people to see the norm.

It’s a powerful lesson, even more so when we realize how much the visibility of giving can affect reciprocity styles. In many domains of life, people end up taking because they don’t have access to information about what others are doing. Just a few months after Freecycle got off the ground, Cialdini worked with a team of psychologists to survey more than eight hundred Californians about their
energy consumption
. They asked the Californians how important the following factors were in shaping their decisions to save energy:

• It saves money
  
• It protects the environment
  
• It benefits society
  
• A lot of other people are doing it
  

The Californians consistently reported that the most important factor was protecting the environment. Benefiting society was second, saving money was third, and following the lead of other people was last. Cialdini’s team wanted to see whether people were right about their own motivations, so they designed an experiment. They visited nearly four hundred homes in San Marcos, California, and randomly assigned them to receive one of four different types of door hangers:

Save money
by conserving energy: According to researchers at Cal State San Marcos, you could save up to $54 per month by using fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool in the summer.

Protect the environment
by conserving energy: According to researchers at Cal State San Marcos, you can prevent the release of up to 262 lbs. of greenhouse gases per month by using fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool this summer.

Do your part to conserve energy for
future generations
: According to researchers at Cal State San Marcos, you can reduce your monthly demand for electricity by 29% using fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool this summer.

Join your neighbors
in conserving energy: In a recent survey of households in your community, researchers at Cal State San Marcos found that 77% of San Marcos residents often use fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool in the summer.

Cialdini’s team conducted door-to-door interviews at each household, without knowing which door hangers they had. When asked how motivating the door hangers were, the residents whose hangers emphasized joining their neighbors reported the lowest motivation. They reported 18 percent lower desires to conserve energy than residents with the protect-the-environment hangers, 13 percent lower than residents with the future-generations hangers, and 6 percent lower than residents with the save-money hangers.

But when Cialdini’s team looked at the residents’ energy bills to see what people actually did, they found something surprising: the residents were wrong about what motivated them. During the following two months, the residents whose door hangers emphasized joining their neighbors actually conserved the
most
energy. On average, the “join your neighbors” hanger led to between 5 and 9 percent fewer daily kilowatt-hours of energy used than the other three hangers—which were all equally ineffective. Knowing that other people were conserving energy was the best way to get residents to follow suit.

But perhaps it was the people who were already conserving electricity in each neighborhood who responded most visibly, picking up the slack for the electricity takers. To find out whether sharing information about their neighbors’ conservation efforts could motivate conservation among people who were consuming high levels of electricity, Cialdini’s team ran another experiment with nearly three hundred households in California. This time, they gave residents door hangers that provided feedback on how their electricity consumption compared with similar households in their neighborhood over the past week or two. These door hangers provided feedback on whether residents were consuming less (giving) or more (taking) than their neighbors.

Over the next few weeks, the electricity takers significantly reduced their energy consumption, by an average of 1.22 kilowatt-hours per day. Seeing that they were taking more than the average in their neighborhood motivated them to match the average, decreasing their energy consumption.
*
But this only works when people are compared with their neighbors. As Cialdini’s team explains:

The key factor was which other people—other Californians, other people in their city, or other residents in their specific community. Consistent with the idea that people are most influenced by similar others, the power of social norms grew stronger the closer and more similar the group was to the residents: The decision to conserve was most powerfully influenced by those people who were most similar to the decision makers—the residents of their own community.

Inspired by this evidence, the company Opower sent home energy report letters to 600,000 households, randomly assigning about half of them to see their energy use in comparison with that of their neighbors. Once again, it was the takers—those consuming the most—who conserved the most after seeing how much they were taking. Overall, just showing people how they were doing relative to the local norm caused a dramatic improvement in energy conservation. The amount of energy saved by this feedback was equivalent to the amount of energy that would be saved if the price of electricity increased by up to 28 percent.

People often take because they don’t realize that they’re deviating from the norm. In these situations, showing them the norm is often enough to motivate them to give—especially if they have matcher instincts. Part of the beauty of Freecycle is that members have constant access to the norm. Every time a member offers to give something away, it’s transparent: others can see how frequent giving is, and they want to follow suit. Because Freecycle is organized in local communities, members are seeing giving by their neighbors, which provides feedback on how their own giving stacks up relative to the local norm. Whether people tend to be givers, takers, or matchers, they don’t want to violate the standards set by their neighbors, so they match.

Today, according to Yahoo!, only two environmental terms in the world are searched more often than
Freecycle
:
global warming
and
recycling
. By the summer of 2012, Freecycle had more than nine million members in over 110 countries, expanding at a rate of eight thousand members every week. Many people still join with a taker mentality, hoping to get as much free stuff as possible. But receiving benefits from a group of local citizens who serve as role models for small acts of giving continues to create a common identity in Freecycle communities, nudging many members in the giver direction. Together, the nine million Freecycle members give away more than thirty thousand items a day weighing nearly a thousand tons. If you piled together the goods given away in the past year, they’d be fourteen times taller than Mount Everest. As Charles Darwin once wrote, a tribe with many people acting like givers, who “were always
ready to aid one another
, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”

When I learned about the success of Freecycle, I began to wonder if these principles could play out in everyday life, in an organization without an environmental focus. What would it take to create and sustain a giving system in a company or a school?

When I joined the faculty at Wharton, the world’s oldest collegiate business school, I decided to try a giving experiment in my classroom. I announced that we would be running an exercise called the Reciprocity Ring, which was developed by University of Michigan sociologist Wayne Baker and his wife Cheryl at Humax. Each student would make a request to the class, and the rest of the class would try to use their knowledge, resources, and connections to help fulfill the request. The request could be anything meaningful in their professional or personal lives, ranging from job leads to travel tips.

In a matter of minutes, I was facing a line of students—some cynical, others anxious. One student pronounced that the exercise wouldn’t work, because there aren’t any givers at Wharton: givers study medicine or social work, not business. Another admitted that he would love advice from more experienced peers on strengthening his candidacy for consulting jobs, but he knew they wouldn’t help him, since they were competing with him for these positions.

Soon, these students watched in disbelief as their peers began to use their networks to help one another. A junior named Alex announced that he loved amusement parks, and he came to Wharton in the hopes of one day running Six Flags. He wasn’t sure how to get started—could anyone help him break into the industry? A classmate, Andrew, raised his hand and said he had a weak tie to the former CEO of Six Flags. Andrew went out on a limb to connect them, and a few weeks later, Alex received invaluable career advice from the ex-CEO. A senior named Michelle confided that she had a friend whose growth was stunted due to health problems, and couldn’t find clothes that fit. A fellow senior, Jessica, had an uncle in the fashion business, and she contacted him for help. Three months later, custom garments arrived at the doorstep of Michelle’s friend.

Wayne Baker has led Reciprocity Rings at many companies, from GM to Bristol-Myers Squibb. Oftentimes, he brings leaders and managers together from competing companies in the same industry and invites them to make requests and help one another. In one session, a pharmaceutical executive was about to pay an outside vendor $50,000 to synthesize a strain of the PCS alkaloid. The executive asked if anyone could help find a cheaper alternative. One of the group members happened to have slack capacity in his lab, and was able to do it for free.

The Reciprocity Ring can be an extremely powerful experience. Bud Ahearn, a group president at CH2M HILL, noted that leaders in his company “are strong endorsers, not only because of the hundreds of thousands of annual dollar value, but because of the remarkable potential to advance the quality of our ‘whole’ lives.” Baker has asked executives to estimate the dollar value and time saved in participating for two and a half hours. Thirty people in an engineering and architectural consulting firm estimated savings exceeding $250,000 and fifty days. Fifteen people in a global pharmaceutical firm estimated savings of more than $90,000 and sixty-seven days.