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Personally, after running the Reciprocity Ring with leaders, managers, and employees from companies such as IBM, Citigroup, Estée Lauder, UPS, Novartis, and Boeing, I’ve been amazed by the requests that have been fulfilled—from landing a coveted job at Google to finding a mentor to receiving autographed memorabilia from a child’s favorite professional football player. But before this happens, just as my Wharton students did, many participants question whether others will actually give them the help that they need. Each time, I respond by asking whether they might be
underestimating the givers
in their midst.

In a study by researchers Frank Flynn and Vanessa Bohns, people learned that they would be approaching strangers in New York City and asking them to a fill out a survey. The participants estimated that only one out of every four people would say yes. In reality, when the participants went out and asked, one out of every two said yes. In another study in New York City, when participants approached strangers and asked them to borrow a cell phone, they expected 30 percent to say yes, but 48 percent did. When people approached strangers, said they were lost and asked to be walked to a nearby gym, they expected 14 percent to do it, but 43 percent did. And when people needed to raise thousands of dollars for charity, they expected that they would need to solicit donations from an average of 210 people to meet their fund-raising goals, anticipating an average donation under $50. They actually hit their goals after approaching half as many people—on average, it only required 122 people, whose donations were over $60 each.

Why do we underestimate the number of people who are willing to give? According to Flynn and Bohns, when we try to predict others’ reactions, we focus on the costs of saying yes, overlooking the costs of saying no. It’s uncomfortable, guilt-provoking, and embarrassing to turn down a small request for help. And psychological research points to another factor—equally powerful, and deeply rooted in American culture—that causes people to believe there aren’t many givers around them.

Workplaces and schools are often designed to be zero-sum environments, with forced rankings and required grading curves that pit group members against one another in win-lose contests. In these settings, it’s
only natural to assume
that peers will lean in the taker direction, so people hold back on giving. This reduces the actual amount of giving that occurs, leading people to underestimate the number of people who are interested in giving. Over time, because giving appears to be uncommon, people with giver values begin to feel that they’re in the minority.

As a result, even when they do engage in giving behaviors, people worry that they’ll isolate themselves socially if they violate the norm, so they disguise their giving behind purely self-interested motives. As early as 1835, after visiting the United States from France, the social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that Americans “enjoy
explaining almost every act of their lives on the principle of self-interest
.” He saw Americans “help one another” and “freely give part of their time and wealth for the good of the state,” but was struck by the fact that “Americans are hardly prepared to admit” that these acts were driven by a genuine desire to help others. “I think that in this way they often do themselves less than justice,” he wrote. A century and a half later, the Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow interviewed a wide range of Americans who chose helping professions, from cardiologists to rescue workers. When he asked them to explain why they did good deeds, they referenced self-interested reasons, such as “I liked the people I was working with” or “It gets me out of the house.” They didn’t want to admit that they were genuinely helpful, kind, generous, caring, or compassionate. “We have
social norms against sounding too charitable
,” Wuthnow writes, such that “we call people who go around acting too charitable ‘bleeding hearts,’ ‘do-gooders.’”

In my experience, this is what happens in many businesses and universities: plenty of people hold giver values, but suppress or disguise them under the mistaken assumption that their peers don’t share these values. As the psychologists David Krech and Richard Crutchfield explained many years ago, this creates a situation where “
no one believes
, but everyone thinks that everyone believes.” Consider a 2011 survey of
Harvard freshmen
: they consistently reported that compassion was one of their top values, but near the bottom of Harvard’s values. If many people personally believe in giving, but assume that others don’t, the whole norm in a group or a company can shift away from giving. “
Ideas can have profound effects
even when they are false—when they are nothing more than ideology,” writes the psychologist Barry Schwartz. “These effects can arise because sometimes when people act on the basis of ideology, they inadvertently arrange the very conditions that bring reality into correspondence with the ideology.” When people assume that others aren’t givers, they act and speak in ways that discourage others from giving, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As a structured form of giving, the Reciprocity Ring is designed to disrupt this self-fulfilling prophecy. The first step is to make sure that people ask for help. Research shows that at work, the vast majority of giving that occurs between people is in response to direct requests for help. In one study, managers described times when they gave and received help. Of all the giving exchanges that occurred, roughly 90 percent were initiated by the recipient asking for help. Yet when we have a need, we’re often reluctant to ask for help. Much of the time, we’re embarrassed: we don’t want to look incompetent or needy, and we don’t want to burden others. As one Wharton dean explains, “The students call it Game Face: they feel pressured to look successful all the time. There can’t be any chinks in their armor, and opening up would make them vulnerable.”

In the Reciprocity Ring, because everyone is making a request, there’s little reason to be embarrassed. By making requests explicit and specific, participants provide potential givers with clear direction about how to contribute effectively. As in Freecycle, the Reciprocity Ring often starts with givers stepping up as role models for contributions. But in every Reciprocity Ring, there are likely to be many matchers and some people who prefer to operate as takers. For a generalized giving system to achieve sustainable effectiveness, as in Freecycle, these matchers and takers need to contribute. Otherwise, the givers will end up helping everyone while receiving little in return, placing themselves at risk for getting burned or burning out. Do matchers and takers step up?

Because people often present meaningful requests in Reciprocity Rings, many matchers are drawn in by empathy. When I heard a powerful CEO’s voice tremble as he sought advice and connections to fight a rare form of cancer, the empathy in the room was palpable. “I was surprised by how much I wanted to help,” one financial services executive confides. “My job requires me to be very task-focused and financially oriented. I didn’t expect to care that much, especially about a stranger I’d never met. But I really felt for his need, and wanted to do whatever I could to contribute and fulfill his request.”

Even when they don’t empathize, matchers still end up making plenty of contributions. It’s very difficult to act like a pure matcher in the
Reciprocity Ring
, since it’s unlikely that the people you help will be the same people who can help fulfill your request. So the easiest way to be a matcher is to try to contribute the same amount that other people do. The Reciprocity Ring creates a miniature version of Panda Adam Rifkin’s network: participants are encouraged to do five-minute favors for anyone else in the group. To make sure that every request is granted, participants need to make multiple contributions, even to people who haven’t helped them directly. By giving more than they take, participants amplify the odds that everyone in the group will have their requests fulfilled, much like Panda Adam setting a pay-it-forward norm in his network.

But what about the takers? Many audiences are concerned that takers will capitalize on the opportunity to get help without contributing in return. To examine this risk, Wayne Baker and I surveyed more than a hundred people about their giver and taker values. Then they participated in the Reciprocity Ring, and we counted the number of contributions they made. As expected, the givers made significantly more contributions than the takers. The givers averaged four contributions each.

Surprisingly, though, the takers were still quite generous, averaging three contributions each. Despite valuing power and achievement far more than helping others, the takers gave three times more than they got. The Reciprocity Ring created a context that encouraged takers to act like givers, and the key lies in making giving public. Takers know that in a public setting, they’ll gain
reputational benefits
for being generous in sharing their knowledge, resources, and connections. If they don’t contribute, they look stingy and selfish, and they won’t get much help with their own requests. “Being altruistic is often seen as ‘good,’ and being greedy or selfish is not,” writes Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely with two colleagues, so giving is “a way to signal to others that one is good.”

Research shows that givers usually contribute regardless of whether it’s public or private, but takers are more likely to contribute when it’s public. In one study, when others could see their results, takers contributed a large number of ideas during
brainstorming
. But when their results were hidden, takers added less value. Other studies reveal that takers
go green to be seen
: they prefer luxurious products over green products when their decisions are private, but shift to green products when their decisions are public, hoping to earn status for protecting the environment. I saw a similar trend among Wharton students: each week in class, I opened the floor for a few students to present requests and invited the whole class to contribute. One November morning, five students made requests, and I was stunned to see a student who had described himself as a taker offer to help four of them. Once his reputation among his peers depended on giving, he contributed. By making contributions visible, the Reciprocity Ring sets up an opportunity for people of any reciprocity style to be otherish: they can do good and look good at the same time.

This raises a fundamental question: does a generalized giving system like Freecycle or the Reciprocity Ring motivate takers to become better fakers, or can it actually turn takers into givers? In some ways, I’d say the motives don’t matter: it’s the behavior itself that counts. If takers are acting in ways that benefit others, even if the motives are primarily selfish rather than selfless or otherish, they’re making contributions that sustain generalized giving as a form of exchange.

That said, if we ignore motives altogether, we overlook the risk that takers will decrease their giving as soon as they’re out of the spotlight. In one study conducted by Chinese researchers, more than three hundred
bank tellers
were considered for a promotion. The managers rated how frequently each bank teller had engaged in giving behaviors like helping others with heavy workloads and volunteering for tasks that weren’t required as part of their jobs. Based on giving behavior, the managers promoted seventy of the bank tellers.

Over the next three months, the managers came to regret promoting more than half of the tellers. Of the seventy tellers who were promoted, thirty-three were genuine givers: they sustained their giving after the promotion. The other thirty-seven tellers declined rapidly in their giving. They were fakers: in the three months before the promotion, they knew they were being watched, so they went out of their way to help others. But after they got promoted, they reduced their giving by an average of 23 percent each.

What would it take to nudge people in the giving direction? When Harvard dean Thomas Dingman saw that Harvard students valued compassion but thought others didn’t, he decided to do something about it. For the first time in the university’s four centuries, Harvard freshmen were invited to sign a pledge to serve society. The pledge concluded: “As we begin at Harvard, we commit to upholding the values of the College and to making the entryway and Yard a place where all can thrive and where the exercise of kindness holds a place on a par with intellectual attainment.”

Believing in the power of a public commitment, Dingman decided to go one step beyond inviting students to sign the pledge. To encourage students to follow through, their signatures would be framed in the hallways of campus dorms. A storm of objections quickly emerged, most notably from Harry Lewis, a computer science professor and the former dean of Harvard College. “An appeal for kindness is entirely appropriate,” Lewis responded. “I agree that the exercise of personal kindness in this community is too often wanting,” he wrote on his blog, but “for Harvard to ‘invite’ people to pledge to kindness is unwise, and
sets a terrible precedent
.”

Is Lewis right?

In a series of experiments led by NYU psychologist Peter Gollwitzer, people who went public with their intentions to engage in an identity-relevant behavior were significantly
less likely
to engage in the behavior than people who kept their intentions private.
When people made their identity plans known to others
, they were able to claim the identity without actually following through on the behavior. By signing the kindness pledge, Harvard students would be able to establish an image as givers without needing to act like givers.

Dingman quickly dropped the idea of posting signatures publicly. But even then, evidence suggests that privately signing a kindness pledge
might backfire
. In one experiment, Northwestern University psychologists randomly assigned people to write about themselves using either giver terms like
caring
,
generous
, and
kind
or neutral terms like
book
,
keys
, and
house
. After the participants filled out another questionnaire, a researcher asked them if they wanted to donate money to a charity of their choosing. Those who wrote about themselves as givers donated an average of two and a half times
less
money than those who wrote about themselves with neutral words. “I’m a giving person,” they told themselves, “so I don’t have to donate this time.” The kindness pledge might have a similar effect on Harvard students. When they sign the pledge, they establish credentials as givers, which may grant them a psychological license to give less—or take more.