Predictably Irrational by Dr. Dan Ariely Page B

would happen if we replaced the payments with a gift? Surely your mother-in-law would accept a good bottle of wine at dinner. Or how about a housewarming present (such as an eco-friendly plant) for a friend? Are gifts methods of exchange that keep us within the social exchange norms? Would participants receiving such gifts switch out of the social norms and into market norms, or would offering gifts as rewards maintain the participants in the social world?
    To find out just where gifts fall on the line between social and market norms, James and I decided on a new experiment. This time, we didn’t offer our participants money for dragging circles across a computer screen; we offered them gifts instead. We replaced the 50-cent reward with a Snickers bar (worth about 50 cents), and the five-dollar incentive with a box of Godiva chocolates (worth about five dollars).
    The participants came to the lab, got their reward, worked as much as they liked, and left. Then we looked at the results. As it turned out, all three experimental groups worked about equally hard during the task, regardless of whether they got a small Snickers bar (these participants dragged on average 162 circles), the Godiva chocolates (these participants dragged on average 169 circles), or nothing at all (these participants dragged on average 168 circles). The conclusion: no one is offended by a small gift, because even small gifts keep us in the social exchange world and away from market norms.
    B UT WHAT WOULD HAPPEN if we mixed the signals for the two types of norms? What would happen if we blended the market norm with the social norm? In other words, if we said that we would give them a “50- cent Snickers bar” or a “ five-dollar box of Godiva chocolates,” what would the participants do? Would a “50-cent Snickers bar” make our participants work as hard as a “Snickers bar” made them work; or would it make them work halfheartedly, as the 50-cents made them work? Or would it be somewhere in the middle? The next experiment tested these ideas.
    As it turned out, the participants were not motivated to work at all when they got the 50-cent Snickers bar, and in fact the effort they invested was the same as when they got a payment of 50 cents. They reacted to the explicitly priced gift in exactly the way they reacted to cash, and the gift no longer invoked social norms—by the mention of its cost, the gift had passed into the realm of market norms.
    By the way, we replicated the setup later when we asked passersby whether they would help us unload a sofa from a truck. We found the same results. People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away. Gifts are also effective for sofas, and offering people a gift, even a small one, is sufficient to get them to help; but mention what the gift cost you, and you will see the back of them faster than you can say market norms.
    T HESE RESULTS SHOW that for market norms to emerge, it is sufficient to mention money (even when no money changes hands). But, of course, market norms are not just about effort—they relate to a broad range of behaviors, including self-reliance, helping, and individualism. Would simply getting people to think about money influence them to behave differently in these respects? This premise was explored in a set of fantastic experiments by Kathleen Vohs (a professor at the University of Minnesota), Nicole Mead (a graduate student at Florida State University), and Miranda Goode (a graduate student at the University of British Columbia).
    They asked the participants in their experiments to complete a “scrambled-sentence task,” that is, to rearrange sets of words to form sentences. For the participants in one group, the task was based on neutral sentences (for example, “It’s cold outside”); for the other group, the task was based on sentences