Serious problem of reciprocity

Hi,
today I would like to write about giving presents, doing favors, blogging and twitter, all of those things have something special in common.

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This is called reciprocity. It’s synonyms could also be mutuality or intercommunity, let me give an example.

When somebody gives you some present, it may even be unexpected or the present is really, really great, you feel like you should give it back to them to equal the values of both sides to erase some kind of “debt”. This does not need to be materialistic, I can even imagine when it could be even emotional or so. Or somebody helps you so you feel that you should do the same to him. This is reciprocity and it seems to me that it is simply everywhere.

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Reciprocity does not always work in this way but it can also work like revenge. When somebody does you something bad, you will feel that you want to return it to them, to make revenge. And well revenge seems like a bad thing, so is reciprocity bad? Should we feel it and behive like it says to us?

I mean when somebody does something nice to you, you should not feel that you should do the same thing. I am not saying that you should not be grateful or so, but do not get manipulated by someones behavior even if it is in a nice manner. You should not be in debt because somebody did something you did not even ask for, imagine getting money but having to pay it back with interest without somebody asking you if you need it.

Reciprocity is a great manipulating tool and it works perfectly because we are so deeply used to it.

When I wrote that reciprocity has to do a lot with blogging and twitter I meant this:
I feel that this happens to me a lot, especially on Twitter where lot of people simply hunt down new followers to get higher numbers on their twitter. I even found an account with 25,000 followers which is not a bad number at all when I consider mine: 16.. but at the same time, the person had 24,500 people who they followed. Now if you have never been on twitter you can not imagine how it looks like but I follow 70 people, those are mostly some famous people, organizations as NASA and so on so they are very active. I get hundreds of tweets every day but if I look at it thrice a day I can get through it and look on everything they posted, most is not so important to me, so it is pretty fast. Imagine what a tide of new tweets you must get when you have 24,500 follows, you are totally flooded and every time you refresh page there are tens of new tweets.

Why those people have so many of them? Reciprocity. They give a follow to you and wait day or two, if you follow them, sometimes under the effect of reciprocity you will keep their follow but if you do not you will lose their interest. This is a clear example of reciprocity because you feel as though you should look on their account and check out their work and even give them follow while otherwise without the effect you would most probably skip them because they are too boring.

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Now I was just throwing it whole down but actually it may have a normal use, even the “golden rule” in ethics is a kind of reciprocity:

One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself

Or also in international politics this is used frequently. When one state gives the other some benefits it is usually followed by the other state doing the same, because it is just fair on the international level. Or this of course may be used in negative way with sanctions.

So I am not saying that you should not follow reciprocity at all, I am just saying that you should not feel disappointed in somebody when she or he does not return your favor because you have done it in free will and they also have a free will to decide if they will return it. At last:

You will never know all the details, but you have to count on all of them

This was kind of strange post for my blog but I have been thinking about this for some time already so I decided to share it with you, thanks for reading.

Dragallur