How you became the person they ask

If you did the count at the end of chapter 1, you may have noticed that the requests don't come from everywhere equally. They come from the same people, and they come to you where they don't come to others. You may have wondered why it's always you who gets asked to take the minutes, mind the dog or organise the card.

Part of the answer is sixty years old. In 1966 Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser reported two experiments on what they called the foot-in-the-door technique. People who had first agreed to a small request were more likely to agree to a larger one later. That held even when a different person made the second request. One yes made the next yes more likely.

Their work looked at it from the side of the person agreeing. There's also the asker's side, and a careful study of that comes from four economists, Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart. They studied the kind of job that everyone in a group would prefer someone else to do, such as writing up the report or sitting on the committee. It helps the group and does nothing for the person who does it. They found that women, more than men, volunteered for these jobs, were asked to do them, and said yes when asked. The important part for us is why. A large part of the difference came from what people believed. Those doing the asking expected women to say yes, so they asked women.

Their study was about men and women at work, and I don't want to stretch it beyond that. But I think the mechanism underneath applies to anyone, and this is my reading. Asking is a small effort and carries a small risk of refusal, so people ask where they expect a yes. They usually mean no harm by it. They take the easy route in the way walkers cut the corner of a lawn, and after enough feet have gone that way there's a path. Every unwilling yes you've given has worn the path a little deeper. Your neighbour didn't pick your door at random. Somebody, at some meeting, said "try number nine, they're always obliging".

So the habit feeds itself from both ends. Each yes makes you a little more likely to give the next one, and makes other people a little more likely to bring you the next request. That's how someone ends up, at forty-five, on three committees and the rota for the church flowers, without having decided to be on any of them.

It would be easy to read this as a story about being exploited. Mostly I don't think it is. The people who ask you aren't plotting. They need things done, and you're where things get done. The reputation is accurate. The question is whether you'd like to keep it.

Reputations built this way can be changed the same way. They run on recent evidence. You don't need to make an announcement or have a difficult conversation with anyone. Three or four friendly nos over a few months are enough to change what people expect, and you'll notice it in how they ask. "Try number nine" becomes "you could try number nine, though they're pretty busy". Requests start to arrive with a way out attached, along the lines of "I know you've got a lot on, so do say if not". That's the sound of people taking your time into account, which they couldn't do while they thought it was free.

This matters most at work, where the jobs nobody wants are handed out by the same logic. Think of the minutes, the induction of the new starter, the leaving present and the office move. If you're the one who always ends up with them, it's worth knowing that this probably rests on a belief about your answer and says little about your abilities. The belief will change when your answers do. Chapter 15 has more on doing that with a manager.