As many of you may or may not know, there are strong forces at work within your mind. Forces that are basically invisible but act with terrific force when the correct situation occurs. One of these forces is reciprocation (as can be learned about in the great book "Influence").
Reciprocation works something like this...
a) I give you something
b) You give me something in return.
Now there are some tricky things here. First of all it doesn't matter if what I give you is something you actually want. The social forces governing this behavior force you to reciprocate even if you didn't want what I gave you. Also, what matters is that you THINK that I gave you something, and it doesn't have to be some material object. For example if I ask you for 50$ and you say no, and then I say "well how about 10$" I have given you something... what I gave you was some cooperation, I was willing to back down which means you now need to reciprocate and give me the 10$... at least so the theory goes.
In any case I am doing a little test in World of Warcraft. I made a list of 50 people (level 75-80) and randomly sent them 1 gold. The subject line said "Merry XMas." Now I wait for the results.
It's been 24 hours since I started and the results are:
1) 7 people returned the gold, only one made a comment saying "you may have the wrong person.
2) 1 person kept the 1 gold and said "LOL do I know you?"
3) 1 person sent me 2 super rejuvenation potions (worth about 1.3GP) and said "Ditto"
So, it's hardly a massive surge of reciprocation for my act of good holiday cheer. I'll give it a few more days and see what comes back. The next step will involve some more detailed messaging, but this will act as a good baseline. The XMas angle won't work for much longer so I may have to be quick...
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