Author: Paul Ratner / Source: Big Think
- Researchers studied what people do when distributing items of unequal value.
- You may be more likely to get the item you want if you let the other person decide.
- Reciprocal generosity can let you “give up your cake and eat it too”.
People may be nicer than you think.
A new study says that people are generally willing to give up something they want to appear generous.Let’s say you’ve been circling the mall’s parking lot and ended up next to a free space right by the elevator at the same time as another car with someone you know from the PTA. And you both have just as much of a claim to the spot. In the meantime, there’s a spot much farther away that opened up as well. What would you do? Chances are, says the new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, if you offer the person in the other car to choose what they’d like to do, they will give up the better spot to you and think you’re generous.
Scientists Michael Kardas, Alex Shaw and Eugene Caruso at the University of Chicago conducted eight studies that showed the complexity of either/or scenarios, when a person has to choose between being worse off materially or having their reputation improve.
By utilizing a group of 300…
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