Ask and You Shall Receive

Editor's Note

August / September 2008 By: Bob Cochnar Volume 6 Number 4

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Most people are reluctant to ask friends or colleagues for help or a favor, probably because the person on the receiving end of the question might turn them down, causing all-around embarrassment. Comes now some new studies that reveal another possibility: people actually like to help other people, if they can.

Frank Flynn, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, says that "people are more willing to help than you think and that can be important to know when you're trying to get the resources you need to get a job done, when you're trying to solicit funds, or what have you."

In the first of two studies, participants asked favors of folks in campus settings after estimating how many people they thought would comply with their requests. They asked to borrow strangers' cell phones, solicited individuals to fill out questionnaires and asked students to help them find the gym—a favor that required students to walk with a participant for at least two blocks in the direction of the gym.

And what do you know? Participants consistently overestimated by 50 percent the number of people they'd have to ask to get a certain number to agree to help them out.

Why don't people depend more on the kindness of strangers, or even friends? The critical factor, Flynn says, is that those who are approached for a favor are under social pressure to be benevolent. Just saying no can make them look bad—to themselves or others, writes Marguerite Rigoglioso, in an article posted on the Stanford B school web site.

"One study found," Rigoglioso says, that those asking for help incorrectly believed it was more likely they would receive help if they were indirect about it—communicating their request with a look rather than a direct question. In contrast, people in the position of offering assistance said they were much more likely to help if asked point blank."

Frank Flynn reports other studies indicate that people overestimate how likely it is that others will come to them for help. "This means," he says, "not only are people not asking for help when in fact they could get it, but they're not encouraging others to come to them for help when in fact they're willing to offer it. That tells us that the —'open-door' policy is basically ineffective unless people are actively encouraged to use it."

So ask. After all, you have nothing to lose and a considerable amount to gain.

The national laboratories for the past several years have been inventing products designed to make us more secure, as you'll discover in the set of articles about homeland security in this issue of Innovation. Whether the Department of Homeland Security has been quick off the mark in putting these inventions and innovations to general use is quite another matter. DHS is a monstrous bureaucracy that sometimes stumbles over its own feet. Observers don't give it high grades. Meanwhile, the labs are doing their job.

There's little doubt that the world must cut carbon emissions by at least 70 percent and international carbon trading isn't going to do it, according to Ross Gelbspan in his important article that begins on Page 12. We're going to need clean energy—fast—and that is largely up to scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs.