Small Favors, Big Pitfalls
Someone’s asked you for a small favor. How often do you say yes without thinking twice? How often do you refuse? How often have you kicked yourself later on for agreeing? And how often have you regretted saying no?
When I totted up my own statistics a few years ago in response to these questions, I realized I was agreeing to do favors for people far too often—little things like giving a lecture, providing an article, or doing a short interview. I frequently invested more time than I’d first imagined to produce results significantly less useful than I’d hoped for all concerned. I set out wanting to do the other person a favor, but ended up doing myself none.
Where does this “disease to please” come from? In the 1950s, biologists attempted to find out why animals that weren’t blood-related still cooperated with each other. Why, for instance, did chimpanzees share meat with other chimpanzees? Why would a baboon make the effort to groom another baboon’s fur? When you’re talking about blood-related animals, the answer is obvious: they share a high proportion of the same genes. Cooperation helps sustain this common gene pool, even if it means particular individuals lose out—even if it means they die. But why would animals that aren’t blood-related accept this risk? To ask the question another way: why do non-related animals sometimes behave altruistically? Why doesn’t the chimp just eat the meat itself, instead of sharing it with a friend? Why doesn’t the baboon just take it easy, instead of expending valuable calories and countless hours picking insects out of a non-relative’s coat? These are not trivial questions.
The answer lies in mathematics, and more specifically in game theory. The American political scientist Robert Axelrod once held tournaments in which different computer programs competed against each other. Each program followed a specific strategy when interacting with its opponent—cooperating with it, betraying it, behaving egotistically, always giving way and so on. In the long term, one strategy emerged as the most successful, one Axelrod called tit for tat. A simple strategy, it consists of the following instructions: first be cooperative, then imitate the behavior of your opponent throughout the rest of the game. So if—after my first move—my opponent cooperates, then I cooperate too. If my opponent doesn’t cooperate, however, if he or she exploits me, then I stop cooperating. If my opponent starts cooperating further down the line, then I adapt my behavior to be cooperative once more.
This is precisely the behavior we see in the animal kingdom. It’s called reciprocal altruism or reciprocity. The chimpanzee shares its meal with another member of the group because it assumes that, next time its friend has food to share, it will return the favor. If the first chimpanzee returns empty-handed from the next hunt, it can still expect to eat.
Reciprocity only works among animals with long memories. A chimpanzee can only pursue this strategy successfully if it remembers whether another member of the group has previously shared food with it. Only a few highly developed species have the necessary capacity for recall—primarily apes. Of course, chimps aren’t conscious of “thinking” strategically; rather, evolution has made this behavior innate. Groups of apes that didn’t pursue the tit-for-tat strategy have vanished from the gene pool. Since we human beings are merely a highly developed species of animal, this impulse toward reciprocity is present in us too.
The tit-for-tat strategy is what keeps the global economy going. We cooperate every day with dozens of people to whom we are not related, many of them on the other side of the world, and have profited remarkably from doing so.
But be careful. Reciprocity has its lurking dangers. If somebody does something nice for you, you feel duty bound to pay them back—by doing them a favor, for example. You allow yourself to become manipulable. Moreover, there is a second, far greater danger: every tit-for-tat strategy begins with an opening move, a leap of faith, a first, spontaneous yes; and often this is precisely what we come to regret. Once the spontaneous yes has slipped out, we tend to rationalize it. We think about the solid arguments for it, and not about the time it will take to fulfill it. We value arguments above time—an error in reasoning, because there is an infinite number of arguments and a decidedly finite amount of time.
Ever since I realized that spontaneously agreeing to things is a deep-seated biological reflex, I’ve been using Charlie Munger’s five-second no as a counter-tactic: “If you say ‘No’ ninety percent of the time, you’re not missing much in the world.” If I’m asked for a favor, I mull it over for exactly five seconds before making up my mind—and the answer is mostly no. I’d prefer to systematically turn down most requests and risk unpopularity than the other way around. Why not give it a try? It’s rare to find yourself immediately dismissed as a scumbag. In fact, most people will secretly admire your consistency.
Two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote: “All those who summon you to themselves, turn you away from your own self.” So give the five-second no a trial run. It’s one of the best rules of thumb for a good life.