LifeGame

Experiment 1 Results

It's now been about 18 days since I did my little WOW gold giving experiment and the results are not as I expected. To update you it worked like this

1) Send 40 random World of Warcraft players 1 gold each through the in-game mail system with the simple message "Merry Xmas."

2) The purpose was to test basic reciprocity is response to an unsolicited gift.

Results:
40 Gold sent to 40 random people.
8 Gold returned.
1 Gift given in return (2 Super Rejuvenation potions - value about 1.4g)
3 personal message as follow
     1) "Ditto" (Action: gave super rejuvenation potions)
     2) "Lol, do I know you?" (Action: nothing, kept gold.)
     3) "You may have the wrong person" (Action: returned gold)

Analysis:
About 77% of people simply kept the gold and did not reply or send anything back. 20% of people returned the gold. Only 1 person acted out of reciprocation. An interesting thing to note is that the people who returned to gold did so mostly within the same day (7/8 within 48 hours). The gift was also given within the first day period. Only 1 reply came more than a week after the start of the experiment, and that person returned the gold with no message.

Something to consider is that many people use automated mail openers which may prevent them from seeing the message at all. They simply open the contents and discard the message thus the reciprocation trigger never fires. It is also possible that my free gift has essentially no value. 1gp for a level 70-80 character is insignificant, but I don't have 40k gold to throw at an experiment, so I will have to tune it in other ways.

Further research:
I may try and target lower level players who are more likely to not have such programs (assuming they are not alts) and also whom are more likely to appreciate small gifts. Alternatively I could send another 40 gold to the same people. I have thought about just giving the gold in trade, but I'm worried about that being "spammy" so I hesitate to do it.

A Little Experiment

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...