If you are a generally agreeable and rewarding person, you have probably had the experience of being mistreated, overlooked, or taken for granted. That may have occurred at work, with friends, in romantic relationships, or in all those situations. In any case, it seems like a mystery, because we’re told that other people like to be treated well and respond positively to it.
In contrast, the disagreeable and disgruntled folks seem to have everyone bending over backward for them. Furthermore, when they give out a scrap of approval or a reward, it is often valued more highly than your constant praise and efforts. Perhaps you have even worked for those breadcrumbs and found them sweet yourself. But, why?
Displacement and Velocity Relation
Back in 1991, Hsee and Abelson published an important paper, with the obscure subtitle of Satisfaction as a function of the first derivative of outcome over time. Contrary to expectation, in their work, the pair found that people’s satisfaction was not just related to an overall outcome (e.g., attaining a goal, getting a reward, establishing a relationship). Instead, satisfaction was also influenced by two additional factors:
- Displacement: The change between the starting place and the outcome (e.g., going from a loss to a gain, or a gain to a loss).
- Velocity: The rate of change as one progressed from the starting situation to the overall outcome.
Thus, we can begin to unravel our mystery… Essentially, people are not just influenced and persuaded by our praise and rewards. Rather, their emotions and satisfaction are also prompted by how much and how quickly those reinforcements change over time. So, if we are always rewarding and pleasant, there is no change—and, consequently, no “boost” to our influential appeal. As a result, those constantly positive interactions can fade into the background, causing us to be overlooked for folks who are more variable and harder to please.
Customer Service, Love, and Video Games
Another curious feature about this dynamic is the sheer variety of places where it has an impact. For example, take an article by Growth and Esmaeilikia (2023) on the effects of different emotional labor strategies on customer satisfaction. Specifically, the pair evaluated whether customer satisfaction was impacted by consistency or change in customer service strategies, from surface level to deep. As we might expect, those who got the consistently deep care strategy were more satisfied than a surface-level brush-off. Nevertheless, the most satisfied customers were those who received surface-level care first and then got the VIP deep treatment later. Feeling like they earned the change over time made that deep care all the sweeter.
A similar effect was found in romantic relationships by Rubin and Campbell (2012). The researchers looked at how day-to-day changes in intimacy between couples impacted passion, sexual occurrence, and sexual satisfaction, too. Like the studies above, a change in intimacy was indeed important. When intimacy stayed the same, passion was lower, and sex was uninspired. When intimacy increased, however, passion, sex, and satisfaction soared.
Finally, this effect appears important to friendships—and perhaps attraction and compulsive online gaming, too. Feng and Zhou (2023) looked at the relationship between children’s online gaming and the pattern of acceptance and rejection they experienced on gaming sites over time. The pair found that kids who were rewarded with a moderate rise in acceptance by others on gaming sites, over time, became the most frequent gamers. So, even here, change is key to influence and impact—whether it is greater service, intimacy, or acceptance over time.
Mixing Your Influence
Given the above, we’re left with the question, why is this approach so persuasive? From my experience, I believe it is because it combines three important influence approaches: positive reinforcement, scarcity, and consistency. Essentially, by mixing these processes, you get more effect for the effort.
Let’s take positive reinforcement (i.e., reward) to start. As I noted in a previous post, rewarding others is influential in getting them to behave in ways you desire more often. Nevertheless, if you do it too frequently and regularly, it can lose some of its effect. For example, if your boss or partner gave you a cookie every time you did something nice for them, how long would it take for you to get a little sick of cookies?
So, here’s where mixing things up and making them a bit scarce is helpful. As I discussed about scarcity previously, making something seem limited, available for a short duration, or unique can increase the perception of its worth. So, withholding your reward or praise every now and then, and making someone work for it again can “reset” and increase how much they value it. Put simply, it shakes them out of taking your rewards for granted—and reminds them how unique and valuable you are as well.
Beyond that, making them work for it requires they invest something, too. When they invest something, they want to remain consistent with that investment. Thus, as I’ve discussed previously, feelings of consistency lead to greater commitment and investment over time. This is also called the foot-in-the-door effect.
As I discuss in my book Attraction Psychology (Nicholson, 2022), these influence processes operate in romantic relationships, too. Nevertheless, we sometimes call them by different names. We speak of rewarding relationships as satisfying, rather than reinforcing. We say people play hard to get when feeling underappreciated, rather than making themselves scarce. Finally, we talk of love and commitment inspired by giving, instead of consistency effects. Overall, though, it is the same general process.
Thus, whether you feel taken for granted at work or in love, you might benefit from the above approach. When your rewards and reinforcements seem to fall flat, make yourself a bit scarce and harder to get. Make them earn it again, invest, and feel more committed in the process as well. The change could be more persuasive for you—and more satisfying for them, too.
© 2024 by Jeremy S. Nicholson, M.A., M.S.W., Ph.D. All rights reserved.