Understand Subtleties Of Doing Favors

“Asking for and doing favors sometimes signals cooperation. More often, it is an unwritten social contract setting up a power relationship.”

Doing favors: Understanding the subtleties

NEW YORK- It can all start with the fatal question, “Could you do this one favor for me?”

With that, and whatever response it engenders, begins the interpersonal maneuvering, the power plays, the jockeying over who owes what to whom.

“The word ‘favor’ implies there’s no cost, but that’s not so,” said Frederick H. Kanfer, a psychology professor.

According to Kanfer, who is also director of clinical training in psychology at the University of Illinois at Champaign, we may ask someone a favor to make that person feel good saying – in effect – “I need you.” We may be enlisting help in avoiding a decision. Or we may be trying to flatter the other person. At the same time, he said, asking a favor “reduces our control over ourselves, because we may feel indebted.”

Whether we do a favor or not can be fraught with similar subtleties: Do we want someone in our debt? What if he or she doesn't reciprocate? Performing the favor can be inconvenient. And it could yield the wrong results - what some have dubbed the well intentioned road to perdition. Take, for example, the friend who was asked to buy a T-bone steak, but got a sirloin instead because the butcher had no T-bones. Were thanks offered for an ingenious rescue? No. The purchase was coldly received.

So why do favors?

“People generally like to be helpful,” said Robert D. Caplan, a research psychologist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. “We also like to appear knowledgeable and competent. And by doing favors, we exercise control over others.”

“Moreover, the cost of not doing a favor is high,” said Michael J. White, a social psychologist at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. “It disrupts our smooth interaction. Here we have asked someone we thought would say ‘yes,’ and they disconfirm our theory about our relationship by saying ‘no.’”

Favor-giving has its limits, however.

“Several psychologists have theorized that people have a great sensitivity to what is fair and equitable,” White said, “which may be why a lot of us become annoyed when other people do us too many favors. Perhaps we sense they are trying to control us.”

“Years ago when I was pregnant, we had a neighbor who, unasked, picked up our children at school and prepared meals for us,” said Margaret J. Rumford, a librarian at the Fairfield (Conn.) Country Day School.

“Initially, I felt grateful. Then I got annoyed, because she wouldn't let me do anything for her.” Only later could she rationalize the incident, thinking. “This woman did things for me but clearly didn't need me doing for her, which left me free to do for someone else.”

Unrecognized favors car be equally frustrating. “Let's say you do me lots of favors,” White said, “and, though you don't ask me, I paint the garage for you. But if you don't recognize my effort as a favor, the balance still is not restored.”

Favors with explicit “givebacks” are unpopular, too. “There are certain types of people who simply have to point out that since they’re doing you a favor, you owe them,” said Susan Handman, a production coordinator at McCaffery & McCall, an advertising agency in Manhattan. “They're giving you no option about responding. Maybe that's one reason why I don't ask for many favors.”

Does she do favors? “Yes, although I feel free to say no, with an explanation to soften the blow,” she said.

Psychologists suggest that we explain refusals in part because it reassures the other person that the relationship is sound: the only reason for not performing the service is that there was a prior commitment. Perhaps that is why Handman finds saying no, without explanation, comparatively easy when the person asking is her husband.

“I can say, ‘No, I don't want to go out and get you some milk,’ and he will understand that I still love him,” she said. “Of course, he may not accept it, in which case he’ll whine about how hungry he is.”

What does she do? “I hit him with a pillow or whine even louder.” – By Margot Slade for the New York Times, 1986

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