Summary: People are helpful more often than not. They don't think less of you for needing help.
Helping, with the right reinforcers in place, feels wonderful. There is no better way to give
someone the opportunity to feel good about themselves than to ask them to help you. It brings out
the best feelings in all of us.
Asking for help makes you more likable. (See Ben Franklin's anecdote about requesting a book from
his enemy's library).
People classified as "givers" tend to be the most successful
"They have the richest, deepest network of connections and supporters, exert a profound
influence on those around them, and like a rising tide, seem to win not by defeating others but
by creating situations that lift everyone's boat."
Helping boosts one's mood because it's prosocial behavior.
Feeling compelled to help erases the self-esteem benefits of providing help.
As a help-giver, look to frame inbound requests to you such that you can give an "enthusiastic
yes!". You will feel better about the whole situation and get the self-esteem benefits.
Don't create distance when asking for help: overdoing empathy, apologizing profusely, using
disclaimers, saying how much they'll enjoy helping, minimizing the magnitude of your request.
When showing gratitude, praise the helper's identity, not their act, and not how much their help
is benefiting you. People like to be helpers, not to give help.
Create an in-group. It connects and motivates each member to help each other. Emphasize shared
experiences. E.g. "We're on the same journey together." "We're both always trying to help our
teams."
Helpers want to feel like they are being impactful, and seeing the impact refuels their tank.
Make it clear and explicit what type and level of impact you expect to result from their help.
Avoid vague appeals, like "I'd like to pick your brain" — they can't connect how that vague
help will result in some outcome.
Asking for help makes us feed bad (chap 1)
This chapter has a list of psychological experiments surfacing just how terrifying it is to ask a
random stranger for a favor.
"In many instances, we ask for help in such a way that we make people feel controlled, rather than
giving them what they need to really want to help us — and to make helping us rewarding."
"Love and belonging might seem like a convenience we can live without, but our biology is built to
thirst for connection because it is linked to our most basic survival needs."
We assume others will say no (chap 2)
In summary: it's actually difficulty for people to say no to to our request for help.
Why do we underestimate how likely people are to do favors?
There's a lot of psychological, interpersonal pressure for people to say yes. If they like you,
it will hurt them to say no. And they don't want to let you down.
We're concerned only with inconveniencing the help giver. "Even though we've all been help
givers, we fail to consider the perspective of other help givers when we most need to."
Direct face-to-face requests are far more awkward to refuse.
Most people… just want to be helpful.
Underestimating the helpfulness of people who've previously said no
Repeated requests get harder to decline, because the refuser begins to see themselves as a bad
person. They can't be busy all the time, can they?
"Door in the face" technique from the book Influence: a technique used by salespeople. Ask for
something the person is likely to say no to. Then retreat from the request to a lesser request,
and they're much more likely to say yes.
Asking someone for help who has said yes in the past yields higher response rates, because of
their need to be consistent.
Remember that it's generally as hard to say no to requests as it is to ask for help.
We assume asking for help makes us less likable (chap 3)
Reverse that conception. The truth is, it makes you more likable. This will make you more
comfortable asking for help.
(Ben Franklin's library book anecdote: requesting to borrow a book from his enemy's library helped
make that enemy into a great, lifelong friend)
Three types of people:
Givers: prefer to have the generosity scales always tipped in their favor
Takers
Matchers: like to be fair and even
People classified as "givers" tend to be the most successful
"They have the richest, deepest network of connections and supporters, exert a profound
influence on those around them, and like a rising tide, seem to win not by defeating others but
by creating situations that lift everyone's boat."
Helping boosts your mood
There's a warm glow after prosocial behavior.
Lending a hand makes us feel wonderful, useful, and can erase a bad mood.
Argues that money can buy happiness if you spend it on other people
"Personal spending was completely unrelated to happiness, but prosocial spending — spending on
others — predicted reliably greater happiness."
The inherent paradox in asking for help (chap 4)
People want to be helpful, but don't want to feel compelled to; feeling compelled destroys the
benefits they get from being a giver. Asking for help often creates this feeling of compulsion.
Ways the giver can react to a request:
Outright no: fairly rare. It's hard to give a clean and untroubled no when someone asks you.
Ignore: let the urgency of the request die down.
Grudging yes: the giver will not derive satisfaction. This is the worst reaction.
Enthusiastic yes: this is strategically the best response. It sets you up, as the giver, to feel
good about yourself.
As a help-giver, look to frame inbound requests to you such that you can give an "enthusiastic
yes!". You will feel better about the whole situation and get the self-esteem benefits.
Help-givers need to feel autonomy. It gives us energy.
The giver should feel like they chose to help, rather than they had to.
Tasks for which you are intrinsically motivated replenish your energy rather than deplete it.
It's powerful.
Research shows that the tasks don't have to make you happy / put you in a good mood; they just
have to be engaging.
Feeling controlled, or micro-managed, takes away your energy and makes you unhappy. This feeling
is caused by rewards, threats, surveillance, and deadlines associated with a task. Rewards
displace the giver's intrinsic motivation.
How do we inadvertently make people feel compelled to help?
"Good people are helpful, we think to ourselves on some level, so if we choose not to help,
where does that leave us? Also, rejecting another person in need creates an awkward tension that
isn't easily resolved, even when we offer apologies and justifications for the rejection."
What happens if we first ask "can you do me a favor?"
This gets the person to pre-commit. It creates resentment.
This is a tactic from Influence. It does create much higher response rates, but it's only a
good tactic in single-turn games, not long-term relationships.
"Awkwardness can arise when two people read their reciprocity type differently. Someone I
thought of as a friend asked me if I would watch her cat when she went on vacation, which I was
happy to do, until she offered me $100 to do it. I was uncomfortable and insulted."
"Avoidance is how we get around the dilemma of feeling controlled by other people's requests for
help."
The four steps to getting the help you need (chap 5)
Step 1: the helper needs to notice that you might need help
People are bombarded with sights and sounds and there are many who need help, so it's not easy
to notice which cases really require attention.
Step 2: the helper needs to believe that you desire help
They don't know if it's really needed; others might be inbound to help; they don't know if it's
welcomed; there's embarrassment if they misinterpret whether you really need help.
Solution: explicitly ask for help, even if it's uncomfortable.
The norm of family privacy is that helpers don't step in to domestic issues because they don't
want to violate domestic privacy.
Step 3: the helper needs to take responsibility for helping
When there are too many potential helpers, like on a city street, it causes diffusion of
responsibility. So they don't help. It's not callousness, but confusion about their role.
So, avoid group emails which ask for help. Single someone out and eliminate the confusion and
give them a clear sense of responsibility.
Experiment results: upon hearing someone who's having a seizure, the more people you think heard
it, the less likely you are to go seek help for them.
Step 4: the helper needs to be able to provide the help you need
If they are busy and feel interrupted, they will give you less/no help. Be clear about what you
need and how much time it will take.
See the Princeton Good Samaritan Study, where seminary students who were told they were late
stepped over someone in need.
Don't make it weird (chap 6)
(Great chapter)
Anecdote about a professor giving up his business class seat to a friend of his mother's: "after
giving her my seat and seeing how happy she became, I sat in economy with the biggest smile for an
hour. I felt massive joy. I was really surprised by the intensity of my own joy in having done
that, in being a person who did such a thing. There were two very happy people on the flight that
day."
"Just think how differently Thomas would have felt had his mother's friend realized he was in
business class, walked up to him, and said, 'Young Tommy, would you mind trading seats?'"
Ways to make it weird (i.e. ways to create distance)
Overdoing it on empathy
Apologizing profusely
It feels controlling.
Apologies are distancing. Instead, it should feel like you're on the same team, leaning on
each other. You don't apologize when your teammates help you.
Using disclaimers
"I don't normally ask for help, but…"
Even if you are a bit uncomfortable about asking for help, try not to telegraph it to the help
giver. Keep it positive and relaxed, and worry a little less about how you look and a little
more about how they feel.
Emphasizing how much the other person will love helping
While true, doing so reeks of manipulating and control.
Portraying the help you need as a tiny, insignificant favor
It's minimizing and feels manipulative.
Don't risk underestimating the work: "proofreading my email should be quick; it's almost
good."
"It should only take you five minutes." Minimizing the size of the task also minimizes the
good feelings the helper gets from doing it.
Reminding people that they owe you one
This feels controlling. Also, calling in favors should be done close to the time of the favor.
The feeling of debt fades with time. No one likes to do things out of obligation.
Talking about how much their help will benefit you
"Doing gratitude right": helpers, like all people, are ego-centric. The motivation to help
stems from improving one's identity and self-esteem. So, direct your gratitude to speak to
that, rather than making the gratitude about yourself and how much you've been helped.
Other-praising:
"It shows how responsible you are"
"You go out of your way"
"I feel like you're really good at that"
Self-benefit (avoid):
It let me relax.
It gave me bragging rights at work.
It makes me happy.
In-group reinforcement (chap 7)
Much of the brain's hardware is dedicated to processing social signals.
We want to be helpful to the groups we're in, like college alums and our family, because our
identity is tied to the group, and if the group succeeds, we feel like we succeed.
Getting someone to think that we're in the same group together predisposes them to want to help us
and like us.
Use the word "together"; it's a powerful word. It conveys that you belong and are working towards
the same goal as others.
Highlight shared goals
Shared goals creates a strong sense of shared identity. So does having a shared enemy.
Consider beginning your request for help by highlighting a shared goal to the help-giver.
Talk about shared experiences and feelings, not shared objective traits
The positive identity reinforcement (chap 8)
If our acts of generosity are attributed by us or others to our identity — "I am a helpful
person" — it's a powerful positive reinforcement. Much more so than being called "helpful." Kids
like to be helpers, not just to help.
Take away: when praising someone, describe and applaud their identity, not just their actions.
What kind of person they are.
People make bigger contributions to charity when asked if they would like to be a "generous donor"
than they do if they are simply asked to donate.
"Gratitude is a glue that binds you and your benefactor together, allowing you to hit the same
well over and over again when you need support, knowing that it won't run dry."
The identity of the giver is what's important for getting good help, not yours.
Giving of the self — giving something only you can give — results in an increased subjective
value of the donation by the giver. They value their possessions and time more than others do,
because it's theirs.
Diffusion of responsibility cheapens the value of the help. If anyone else could've stepped in
to help in the same way, the help is not unique and thus the giver's contribution is less.
The effectiveness reinforcement (chap 9)
Higgens argued that the desire to feel effective — to know what's real, manage what happens, and
achieve the outcomes you're looking for — is what truly engages people and gives their lives
meaning.
It's all about impact. "If I donate money to your cause without a clear sense of the tangible
impact my money is having on the lives of others, what gratification can I really derive from it?"
Helpers want to feel like they are being impactful, and seeing the impact refuels their tank.
How to increase your helper's sense of effectiveness
Make it clear and explicit what type and level of impact you expect to result from their help.
Avoid vague appeals, like "I'd like to pick your brain" — they can't connect how that vague
help will result in some outcome.
Follow-up afterward. Let them know in advance that you will. This increases their confidence
that they'll end up feeling effective.