SUMMARY The purpose of this research is to examine the influence of reciprocity and heuristics on people and their attitudes when placed in different situations. As an outcome, the results came different from the hypothesis, in which we were expecting great differences among the factors. The method used in the analysis was questioning several respondents thru four different scenarios with different approaches of heuristics and reciprocity. Despite the difficulties and the non-expected results, the research showed that the biggest problem was the scenarios, that had a ‘wrong’ approach, and further on everything went different from expected, because of it. Overall, several factors were dispensable for the outcome, in which could have brought different results. Topics as gender difference, age, employed or student, could have given a different side to the research, even thought it was 249 different respondents. Also, it was a mistake not to test the questionnaire first and don’t have the same amounts of equal factors. With those, we might have gotten a slight chance to come near the hypothesis. For further researches, the important thing is to keep it simple to the basics, and test it in different situations, to see and analyze which one gets closer to your hypothesis, so the work can keep moving on.
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ď ś TABLE OF CONTENTS Summary Introduction Foreword Theoretical background Hypothesis Scenarios Method Results Conclusion Discussion References
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INTRODUCTION . 1.1 FOREWORD We are five students of the Fontys Academy for Creative Industries and together we develop a research about ‘Heuristics’ and ‘Reciprocity’ of the Advanced Course Online Psychology. We have conducted some research about the two terms and processed the results in SPSS. The content of the research and the results are processed in this report. 1.2 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Heuristics We make a lot of judgements and decisions every day. If we consider analyze them carefully, we would not have the time to do something else. Thankfully, our brain uses some strategies to process information and to draw conclusions quickly. Through these strategies, called mental strategies, our reasoning can be off sometimes. When we are trying to make a decision, we often turn to these mental shortcuts when we need a quick solution. The mental shortcut that helps us make decisions and judgements quickly without having to spend a lot of time researching and analyzing information, is called 'heuristic'. Heuristics can speed up our problem and decision making-process. For example, when you walk down the street you see a seat tied to a rope above the sidewalk. Without a second thought you would choose to walk around that area instead of directly underneath the seat. Your intuition would tell you that walking under the seat could be dangerous, so you make a snap judgement to walk around the danger zone. You would probably not stop and assess the entire situation or calculate the probability of the seat falling on you or your chances of survival if it happened. You would use heuristics to make the decision quickly and without using much mental effort (Long-Crowell, E. 2015). In this upcoming example, your feelings and emotions influence your decision making. For heuristics it is relevant to know how much your emotions might influence the decisions you make and the impact this might have on your life: • •
Researchers have found that when you are in a positive emotional state, you are more likely to perceive an activity as having high benefits and low risks. Researchers have found that when you are in a negative emotional state, you are more likely to perceive an activity as having low benefits and high risks.
Heuristics are very helpful, but they can introduce errors. There are different types of heuristics. There are three types that can leads to dumb decisions from people who are very intelligent. •
Availability heuristics
This type of heuristic is being used when you make a decision based on how easy it is to think of examples when making a decision or judgement. The problem with availability heuristic is that the assumption is not always right. There are many situations in which this type is useful and accurate. In dangerous situations for example. We are more likely to be cautious and protect ourselves if we think of a similar situation that ended badly for someone else.
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Representativeness
This type of heuristic is being used when you make a decision by comparing information to our prototypes. For example, if someone describes an older women who is nice, warm and and takes care of a lot of children, most people think this women is a grandmother. This is because she fits in our mental representation. The problem with representativeness heuristic is that the assumption is not always right, but we do save much time and energy because we make a snap decision without thinking about it too much. •
Base-rate heuristics
This type of heuristic is being used, when you make a decision based on probability. For example, when you live in a big city and you hear an animal rowling around midnight you would probably assume it was a dog, because wolves are not likely to be found in the city. This type of heuristics saves also al lot of time and energy.
Reciprocity
Business, Communication and Psychology are some of the fields that use persuasion to influence people on its decisions. On the field of marketing for example, there is a big range of strategies used to convince the consumers to make purchases. Some of these tactics are straight and direct, and tell exactly what you have and need to do. Other strategies use a more subtle approach, and get down deep on the human behavior principles, using psychology and philosophy to get closer to its consumers. One of these approaches is the Reciprocity rule. In Marketing and Business, many sales and promotions use this principle because it brings benefits for both parts, the seller and the buyer. An easy and daily example are the free giving samples in supermarkets for the consumers. This strategy of samples is one of the easiest ways to get more consumers, once they have the opportunity to try your product. Many food and drinks companies implement this tactic in its marketing planning. For the costumers, when approached by someone in the shops with samples with the ability to try it out, that’s when you have the start of a reciprocal relationship. Because of the fact that once the costumer receive something for free, he/she gets the feeling that it has to return the favor in some way. It’s not a need or an obligation, but the consumer feel the pressure among the circumstances, and most occasions buys the product as a thanking manner for receiving it. It’s a clear and effective way to use reciprocity as a marketing strategy, and it gets positive results for the companies. The Australian blogger Yaro Starak sates in his article ‘How to invoke Reciprocity to influence people, drive traffic and make sales’ that there is a great example of how reciprocity worked for him and his business (Starak, 2015). During a podcast, he interviewed several experts of his area for content to the articles of his blog. After the texts were ready he asked for help of free divulgation of the articles, and the participants were glad to help. According to Starak, the people shared his article because ‘they felt they “owed” me for helping increase their exposure thanks to writing about them’. Again, we see the receiving-giving situation. When Starak wrote about these people’s work, he gave them access and exposure in the media, thru his blog, and therefore the act of sharing came in an easy and natural way (Starak, 2015). For reciprocity, you can go deep down the studies of Psychology explaining the behavior of society and man. Trying to explain why you would give something of yours, while expecting something in return. Of course, in many different fields reciprocity works differently in each situation, but every time it will work as a tool for persuasion. Besides this in many cases it could be possible that the returning favour may not happen but persuasion is what makes the circle of giving and receiving full and therefore making reciprocity a complete process. 5
1.3 HYPOTHESIS According to our research, there are a few things that we want to examine. First of all, our purpose is to implement heuristics and reciprocity in certain scenarios. The relationship we want to examine is for example, if positive or negative heuristics has a / has not a relation to peoples' reaction in a certain situation. We also want to examine if reciprocity influences peoples' reaction positively or negatively or has no influence at all. Based on these things, we set up some hypothesis that examine the relationships with heuristics and reciprocity. Our hypothesis are stated below: Heuristics H0: Implementing positive/negative heuristics in a situation has a relation to peoples' reaction. H1: Implementing positive/negative heuristics in a situation has no relation to peoples' reaction. Reciprocity H0 Implementing reciprocity in a situation has a positive relation to peoples' reaction. H1: Implementing reciprocity in a situation has no positive relation to peoples' reaction. We expect that after conducting this research and examining the results we find a relation between heuristics and reciprocity to peoples’ reaction. 1.4 SCENARIOS We developed four different scenarios. Scenario 1 contains reciprocity and heuristics with a positive approach. Scenario 2 contains reciprocity and heuristics with a negative approach. Scenario 3 contains only heuristics with a negative approach. Scenario 4 contains only heuristics with a positive approach. These four scenarios were asked to different kind of people, to see what the differences is between the answers and persons. •
SCENARIO 1: Imagine you are going to your favourite free of charge festival for 5 years. Because of the fact that you and several neighbours expressed that there is a need for a festival, the municipality decided to finance and organise it. Only this year the municipality won’t be able to cover the costs. To help with the costs, the community is looking for volunteers who want to work half a day with the set-up of the festival. With the help of volunteers, chances are 85% that the festival can continue. Would you like to volunteer?
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SCENARIO 2: Imagine you are going to your favourite free of charge festival for 5 years. Because of the fact that you and several neighbours expressed that there is a need for a festival, the municipality decided to finance and organise it. Only this year the municipality won’t be able to cover the costs. To help with the costs, the community is looking for volunteers who want to work half a day with the set-up of the festival. With the help of volunteers, chances are 15% that the festival cannot continue. Would you like to volunteer?
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SCENARIO 3: Imagine you are going to your favourite free of charge festival for 5 years. The municipality decided to finance and organise it. Only this year the municipality won’t be able to cover the costs. To help with the costs, the community is looking for volunteers who want to work half a day with the set-up of the festival. With the help of volunteers, chances are 15% that the festival cannot continue. Would you like to volunteer?
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SCENARIO 4: Imagine you are going to your favourite free of charge festival for 5 years. The municipality decided to finance and organise it. Only this year the 6
municipality won’t be able to cover the costs. To help with the costs, the community is looking for volunteers who want to work half a day with the set-up of the festival. With the help of volunteers, chances are 85% that the festival can continue. Would you like to volunteer?
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ď ś METHOD The method that is used for doing this research is a quantitative research method. Because of the fact that there were a lot of people who had to answer to different scenarios, this was the most suited method. All the four different scenarios had to be presented equally to all the people who filled in the questionnaire. This could be realized with a questionnaire via 'Qualtrics'. The benefit of this site/tool, is that there are a lot of options at your disposal. Every respondent could be presented with one of the four scenarios and there was the option to do present the questionnaire in English and Dutch. The disadvantage of this site however was that there was a limit to a hundred respondents. If you did not upgrade you had to process all the responses manually. This is what we had to do with 249 respondents. Questionnaires seemed a logical and easy option as a way of collecting information from people. In no-time we enough respondents from all over the world. We choose to use closed questions, which only could be answered with a yes or a no. With this questions we wanted to discover the effect of heuristics and reciprocity in the scenarios. Afterwards, we realize this was a mistake, because it limited the respondents to answer the questions. We did not test the questionnaire before we launched it. A lot of people did not get the questions (scenarios) or wanted to answer more than only yes or no. We could have prevented this by testing a trial version upfront. Participants Participants were 249 persons (177 female/72 male), mainly from Brazilia and the Netherlands.
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RESULTS ….
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ď ś CONCLUSION This study generate the following conclusions: If you don’t take all the variables in the consideration, there is a small tendency to a positive reciprocity. The research was mostly answered by students, which influenced highly the outcomes of the results. Besides that, the ratio between men and women was not prorated. The questionnaire was answered by a lot more women than men. There was also a lack of balance between people who had a job and people who had not a job. This influences the outcomes of the results as well. From the outcomes of SPSS, there was not a significant answer of one of the four scenarios. There is also not given a concrete answer on the hypothesis, due of the significant lack.
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DISCUSSION After analyzing our responses, the outcome was clear. We had too many people agreeing that they would volunteer and help out the municipality with the festival. This is where it all went ‘wrong'; the word ‘festival’. Our questionnaire was mostly presented to students. After seeing the results, we now realize that students have a positive connection to festivals. This means that when we would have used a different scenarios with for example asking students to volunteer helping old people and go have a walk with them, the outcome might have been totally different. This is indirect linked to the next thing we’ve learned conducting this research. The questionnaire was mostly presented to students. This influenced the outcome of the questionnaire in such a way that it’s hard to find a significant effect of heuristics or reciprocity. The questionnaire should have been presented to an equally divided group of different people instead of mostly students. We also noticed that most of the respondents do have a job while a small portion of the respondents does not. This is exactly the same problem as with the fact that we presented the questionnaire to an unequal group of student/non-students. Besides this, the questionnaire was presented to an unequal share of male/female. The results show that there are 177 female while there are only 72 male. This should have been equal as well to have the best and neutral outcome. When we tried to find out if there was any significant effect of heuristics or reciprocity, we also had to conclude that only using two options to choose from as an answer wasn’t good for the research and results. Just yes and no as an answer should have been a 5-scale options. For example: 'Strongly Yes – Yes – Undecided / Neutral - No - Strongly No’. With these five options we would have had a better inside in the effect of the implementation of heuristics or reciprocity in our four scenarios. As we presented our questionnaire to people all around the world we also offered a English version. This might have been influencing the results and outcome of this research as well. It was hard to translate the Dutch scenario’s literally to English so that they had exactly the same meaning. The English level of respondents is also unknown. We are not sure if the people from foreign countries interpreted the scenario’s as they would have if it was written in their native language. Also we have to deal with people from different cultures with a different approach to the situation. After having a look at the results of the questionnaire and concluding all of this, we now also realize that saying yes is something entirely else than actually doing so. About 3 out of 4 people said that they would like to volunteer, but we are not sure if this means that they would have showed up to help. People like to answer yes as if they are good people who would like to help the municipality now that they can’t fully fund the festival.
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ď ś REFERENCES About Psychology (n.d.). What Is the Rule of Reciprocity?, Retrieved September 18, 2015, from http://psychology.about.com/od/socialinfluence/f/rule-of-reciprocity.htm Cherry, K. (2015), What is a heuristic?, Retrieved September 18, 2015, from http://psychology.about.com/od/hindex/g/heuristic.htm DicionarioInFormal (2014). Reciprocidade, Retrieved September 18, 2015, from http://www.dicionarioinformal.com.br/reciprocidade/ Long-Crowell, E. (2015), Types of Heuristics: Availability, Representativeness & Base-Rate, Retrieved September 18, 2015, from http://study.com/academy/lesson/heuristics.html p2pfoundation (January 10, 2007), Multi category search, Retrieved September 18, 2015, from http://p2pfoundation.net/Special:MultiCategorySearch Psychology Press (n.d.). De norm van reciprociteit, Retrieved September 17, 2015, from http://psypress.co.uk/smithandmackie/resources/topic.asp?lang=nl&topic=ch10-tp-02 Skepsis (1998). Valkuilen in ons denken, Retrieved September 17, 2015, from http://www.skepsis.nl/valkuilen.html Starak, Y. (2015). How To Invoke Reciprocity To Influence People, Drive Traffic And Make Sales, Retrieved September 18, 2015, from http://www.entrepreneursjourney.com/11221/reciprocity/ Wikipedia ( July 20, 2015), Reciprocity( social psychology), Retrieved September 18, 2015, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_%28social_psychology%29 Yacubovich, O. (October 23, 2014). Exploiting the power of reciprocity, Retrieved September 18, 2015, from http://blog.commercesciences.com/exploiting-the-power-of-reciprocity/
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