Ask for help face-to-face, not via phone or email, if you want results

By Emily Reynolds

We probably all like to think of ourselves as generous, giving people, ready to provide friends and even strangers with favours when they need help. If we’re honest, however, that probably isn’t always the case — in fact, we’re more likely to agree to a favour when we think we might not have to follow through at all.

A new study in Social Psychological and Personality Science looks at another facet of favours — the most effective way of asking for them. The team finds that we don’t expect there to be much difference between asking for favours in text-based, video and face-to-face settings— but that in reality, asking for help face-to-face is far more likely to yield results.

In the first study, participants were randomly assigned to one of five communication channels — face-to-face, video call, audio call, video message or audio message — and told they would be asking five friends for a favour through this channel. The favour, proofreading a half page piece of writing, was asked for using a specific script in order to maintain consistency across conditions. After reading the instructions, participants were asked to imagine asking for help from their friends, and in particular predict how many of them would agree to help. Finally, having left the lab, they actually asked their friends for the favour.

Face-to-face was significantly more effective than any other channel at successfully eliciting favours. But despite this, part...

Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - February 1, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Social Source Type: blogs