Reinforcements: How to Get People to Help You (Japanese title: 人に頼む技術 - コロンビア大学の嫌な顔されずに人を動かす科学)

Summary

1. For someone to feel good about helping, a sense of agency — that they extended a hand because they wanted to — is essential. So you should avoid ways of asking that strip that agency away
2. Conversely, take care to ask in ways that create a sense of agency. Concretely:
   1. Make clear “who” you are asking and “what” you are asking for
      • It’s better to make the request feel special (I want to ask you, nobody else)
   2. Make the request one that fosters a sense of being on the same team. At work, that means teammates achieving the same goal; in a family, raising everyone’s happiness — make them aware that it benefits everyone
      • Use phrases that evoke shared membership, like “together” and “our”
   3. Make the request one that appeals to the other person’s self-esteem. By expressing gratitude routinely and building a trusting relationship, you help the person you’re asking hold the belief that “I am a good person.” Then frame the request so it appeals to that self-esteem
      • Lead with “your help is always a huge relief to me,” then make the request
   4. Give the person you’re asking discretion
3. People turn down requests less often than you think. Drop your preconceptions and try asking with the above in mind

Why Asking Someone for Something Feels Awkward

• In clinical psychology experiments, the proportion of people who answer “I’ll be refused if I ask” exceeded the proportion who were actually refused when they asked. Humans are creatures who feel uncomfortable merely imagining making the most trivial request

Sources of the awkwardness (anxiety) when asking

1. Threat to status
   • People want to be the more respected party. Making a request creates anxiety that respect will be lost
2. Threat to certainty
   • People want to predict their own future, and feel anxiety at the uncertainty of a request being refused
3. Threat to autonomy
   • People want to control things by their own will, but making a request means entrusting things to someone else, which creates anxiety
   • Losing autonomy is strongly stressful
     • You’d have happily drawn a picture given paper and a pen, but being told “draw a picture” makes you not want to
   • People don’t want to feel “controlled.” Deadlines and pressure work the same way
4. Threat to relatedness
   • Anxiety that you might be excluded from the community you belong to
5. Threat to fairness
   • People constantly seek fairness in their relationships, and feel anxiety that making a request will upset that balance

Why We Assume We’ll Be Refused

Analyzing research on a variety of requests — such as asking people on campus to fill out a survey — subjects underestimated their success rate by about 48%. In other words, requests actually succeed about twice as often as expected. (Reader’s note: without comparing against the actual success rate, it’s hard to tell what “twice” amounts to.)

People Want to Be Good People

Askers expect to be refused more than they actually are. Where does that gap come from? It’s because the asker underestimates:

1. The burden of refusing on the person being asked
2. The good feeling that comes from having helped

Misconceptions about the person being asked

1. Once refused, you’ll be refused next time
   • It depends on the relationship, but there is a psychological effect where having refused once makes it harder to refuse the next time
   • Be careful: exploiting that psychology may destroy the relationship
2. Once they’ve done it for you, they’ll refuse next time
   • Foot-in-the-door
   • Once someone has accepted, it’s hard to refuse the next time. It’s a common sales technique — for example, receiving “free rice” when getting a moving quote makes it hard to turn down the quote itself
     • Humans find the cognitive dissonance of “I received something but gave nothing back” uncomfortable
   • Cognitive dissonance
   • Rather than asking for the survey right away, making a small request first — “could I ask you something quick?” — and then following with “we’re running a survey…” makes refusal less likely. Overuse it and you’ll be disliked
3. Making requests makes people dislike you
   • Once someone has answered a request and been thanked, they want to be good to you next time as well. Then, when asked again, cognitive dissonance makes it harder to refuse

How to Get the Help You Need

When you need help or support, it comes across to the people around you far less than you think.

Steps to getting help

1. Make the other person notice
   • This is especially pronounced at work: when people are concentrating on something, their attention stops going to their surroundings
2. Convince the other person that you are asking for help
   • People feel the risk of misunderstanding that help is needed when the other person isn’t actually in trouble. So being able to know “this person definitely needs help” reduces that risk
3. The helper has to take on responsibility
   • When there are many people who could help, people feel “someone else can do it…”
     • Asking “could someone handle this” at work means nobody does
   • To make responsibility land, make clear “who” you want to do it
4. The helper has to be in a position to offer help
   • Even seminary students stop paying attention to helping when they’re pressed for time
   • Explain properly “what you’re asking for and how much help you need.” Then it’s important to “ask for the right amount of help,” and to “accept the help offered even if it differs from what you asked for”

Bad Ways of Asking

Given all the above, asking in ways that strip the other person’s agency, dilute their sense of responsibility, or demand more help than is appropriate tends not to work. Concretely, avoid the following ways of asking.

1. Leaning too hard on empathy
   • Demanding excessive empathy makes people push back. Feeling responsibility too heavily makes them want to lighten or avoid that responsibility (to reclaim autonomy)
2. Apologizing constantly
   • People want to be part of the community, so being apologized to endlessly makes the relationship feel distant
     • For instance, if a close family member says “I’m so terribly sorry” and then makes a simple request, it feels unpleasant
   • This doesn’t apply to high-stakes help, like missing an important deadline. In that case, when you do get help, offer apology and thanks proportional to it
3. Making excuses
   • When a request is made reluctantly, the helper’s sense of fulfillment is lost. Ask in a relaxed way so the person asked feels good about it
4. Overselling how fun the task is
   • Overemphasizing the benefits makes someone who doesn’t find it interesting feel controlled instead
5. Insisting the request is trivial
   • If the amount isn’t right, the “able to help” state never materializes to begin with. And when it diverges from what the person asked expected, you lose their trust, and they lose their sense of responsibility for what they were asked to do
6. Reminding them that they owe you
   • This too makes the person asked feel controlled
   • Reciprocity does have force in getting people to respond to a request, but being told so by another person produces a sense of being controlled

Impressions

I’ve long found asking people for things difficult, which is why I read this book, and learning first that “people don’t refuse requests as much as you think” was useful.

Summing up the book, what matters is the agency of the person being asked, and it’s important to avoid ways of asking that strip it away. For that, an honest request is best, and the most effective approach is to consult openly without worrying about your position or feeling small.

It’s obvious, but hard to practice. I’d like to get to where I can ask this way as a matter of habit.