A Theory on Reciprocity, part 2
If you’ve ever felt compelled to overdeliver, only felt safe giving the absolute most and/or are in the habit of giving away things for free, that’s by design. And the science has some things to say about it.
A wise friend once told me the story of how she “discovered the meaning of resentment.”
I should preface this by saying that this friend of mine has a PhD in Linguistics. By the time of this telling, she had already spent the decade or so since earning said degree wrangling words for a living.
So this particular turn of phrase drew my special attention.
“Many years ago, a friend told me that resentment is when we’ve offered too much, or overextended ourselves and we don’t feel we’re getting enough back in return.” Lara uses that understanding as a litmus test in her own business today.
I immediately saw the Reciprocity Gap at play.
Reciprocity is ultimately about a return on one’s investement.
If your return is largely determined by how socially acceptable it is to exploit you, as we established in part one of this series, the rates of return on EVERYTHING must be called into question.
This advice seems neutral. And just about every business owner has heard it at some point in their journey—usually in the course of developing a winning content strategy. But in light of the Reciprocity Gap, it takes on a new, somewhat more nefarious dimension.
This advice has worked for some. It’s true. Possibly without reprocussions like resentment, or the dilution of their brand’s prestige. For some, it is perfectly resonable to provide a “free value” and then to turn around and ask for something in return. But here’s the thing: we’re not in the habit of exploiting those leaders or people like them in our society. They’re not the expected exploitables. They’re at the top of the unspoken reciprocity food chain, so to speak.
For the underrecognized, this advice simply reinforces some of the poisionous dynamics that uphold the reciprocity gap in the first place.
“Do (more) unseen labor, for free” is not a winning strategy for a leader society has already been taught to exploit.
And even worse is the fact that as we play with the expectations of this dynamic we risk triggering negative social sanctions.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that “free” is kind of dying. More specifically, its utility is becoming more and more limited.
According to Google, searches using “free” as a modifier have been in steady decline over the last 16 years. And generally when the term is used now, it is used to find things that are “free from.” For example, breads that are ”free” from gluten (gluten free bread). Unsurprisingly perhaps, in the UK, searches utlizing “cheap” as the modifier have declined steadily over the last 15 years as well.
“Best” as a modifer on the other hand is steadily climbing in usage. The analysis even shows an “impressive degree of negative correlation,” which in English means the patterns are likely related and demonstrate a trend. One where in we’ve become less interested in free and cheap and more interested in the best.
This is a common refrain.
The idea is that by overdelivering you are investing in the future. In an expected return.
But, as you know by now, you my dear reader are expected to overdeliver.
And depending on the role society has assigned you (roles that are certainly shifting, but nevertheless persist in a meta sense) overdelivering might look a lot like…well…delivering. See the Superwoman Schema for examples. What this means? An even lower return on this investment than someone with more privilege may get.
In other words, resentment is likely.
“More” here can mean anything. In more places. More often. With more consistency. Even with more “personality”
Here’s the thing: being in sight is not the same as being seen. So “show up more” is just bad advice on it’s face.
Here’s the math:
There has never been as much content and data being stuffed in our faces as there is today.
Even by old metrics we were being shoveled something like 3,000 to 10,000 marketing messages a day. And that was in 2007.
We only have the capacity to attend to maybe 100 of those marketing messages.
Add to that the fact that most of us were held hostage to this onslaught for two or more years during the height of the pandemic in a way we had never been previously, while navigating the heightened threat awareness characteristic of that time. That’s led many into a state I call Attentional Overload, where our capacity for paying attention to anything is diminished by the fatigue brought on by the COVID era.
Taken together, this means our brains are filtering out way more than we’re taking in.
In fact those filters are in overdrive.
So being visible or “showing up more” does nothing about those overactive brain fliters. It doesn’t mean you’re more likely to be remembered or even noticed.
It just adds to the noise.
Being in sight is NOT the same thing as being seen.
And even if we were to ignore all of that—and that’s a big if—we still run into visibility biases like the racial attention deficit.
The quick run down? Even if folks were forced to pay attention to you, even if they know you’re relevant to a problem they need to solve, if you’re a black American, white Americans are still 33% more likely to overlook or ignore you*.
Yup.
And that’s just two very limited dimensions of race. We haven’t even talked gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, etc.
So no. You’re not imagining that gaping void eating up all your time, energy and money.
It’s an Invisibility Tax you pay to get the same return as your peers that enjoy more privilege.
So what does all this mean for us?
It means people have been conditioned to ignore us. And we have not only been manipulated to see that systemic failing as our own, we’ve also been conditioned to give the absolute most to compensate for it.
So what do we do about it?
Join me for part 3, the next installment of this series where I tackle that very question.
*this is something that all underrecognized leaders experience to a degree. So take that 33% and extrapolate, based on your relative privilege, where it is you may fall.
This piece is a work in progress and is periodically updated as new insights come to light.