- Email: [email protected]
Offering more support than we seek
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) 267–270
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jesp
FlashReports
Offering more support than we seek q Lindsey A. Beck *, Margaret S. Clark Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 20 April 2008 Revised 6 August 2008 Available online 22 August 2008 Keywords: Close relationships Support
a b s t r a c t Two studies provide evidence that, in friendships, people offer support to partners more often than they request identical support for themselves. In one study, people reported being more likely to offer different types of support (e.g., a ride to a train station) than to request identical support. This effect was more pronounced for casual than established friendships. In a second study, people assigned randomly to be in a position to give support or to seek identical support from a friend gave more support than they sought. The observed asymmetry is attributed to people balancing desires to establish and strengthen communal relationships against desires to protect the self from rejection, not to people being inherently more unselfish than selfish. Published by Elsevier Inc.
People are admonished that it is better to give than receive. An implication is that they must be urged to give support. Yet we hypothesized that balancing relationship promotion with risk regulation would naturally lead people to be more willing to offer than seek equivalent support in friendships. We tested this hypothesis in two studies. One might think predictions that people will be more likely to give or seek support would concern whether people are primarily selfish, yet we take no position on that issue. Our hypothesis is based on the assumption that people have strong needs for relationships (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) characterized by mutual non-contingent responsiveness to one another’s welfare (Clark & Mills, 1979, 1993; Mills & Clark, 1982; Clark & Monin, 2006) and that it is less threatening to initiate and maintain such relationships by offering support than by seeking it. Although mutual responsiveness can be initiated or maintained by persons offering support (and partners accepting it without feeling compelled to repay) or by persons seeking support (and partners providing it without expecting compensation), we postulate the former strategy is more common. Offering support does not reveal one’s vulnerabilities; seeking support does. If one is unsure of the partner’s care one may fear that revealing vulnerabilities will lead to being seen as weak or needy, to the partner exploiting one’s vulnerabilities, and to one’s request being declined. Having one’s offer of support declined does not suggest a lack of partner care for one’s welfare (and, indeed, may suggest the partner does care and does not
q This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS 9983417. We wish to thank David Kenny for his helpful comments on this manuscript. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (L.A. Beck).
0022-1031/$ - see front matter Published by Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2008.08.004
want one to go to the trouble). In contrast, having one’s request for support declined does suggest a lack of partner care. Offering support conveys one is compassionate and capable and a desirable relationship partner; seeking support may suggest that one is too entitled and needy to make a good relationship partner. Thus, we predict offers will be more frequent than requests for support in symmetrical communal relationships such as friendships. Murray, Holmes, and Collins’ (2006) relationship risk regulation model provides a broader perspective on our rationale. They suggest that desire to seek interpersonal connectedness is balanced by need to protect oneself against rejection. Offering (but not requesting) support can be a means of promoting one’s partner’s interest in (and, if accepted) dependence upon a communal relationship without risking increases in one’s own dependence. Offers allow for the partner’s acceptance (increasing the partner’s dependency) and for voluntary reciprocal offers which help a person discern the partner’s intrinsic motivation to be responsive to the person’s needs. If reciprocal offers are forthcoming, the person can risk more dependence upon the relationship. Requests for support that may interfere with the partner’s own needs represent a more direct and diagnostic means of discerning partner interest (Holmes & Rempel, 1989; Murray & Holmes, 2008). However, we believe such requests are often foregone in lieu of a more cautious ‘‘offer then wait for acceptance and/or reciprocation” strategy to bypass rejection or exploitation of one’s vulnerabilities (MacDonald & Leary, 2005). We suggest that the predicted asymmetry will be most pronounced in early stages of friendships when people are most likely to feel vulnerable and high degrees of trust have not developed. We tested our hypotheses in two studies. In the first, we asked people to report their willingness to request different
L.A. Beck, M.S. Clark / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) 267–270
types of support from a casual or close friend or their willingness to offer identical support to a casual or close friend. In the second, we gave people the opportunity to request or offer identical support to an existing friend and observed the frequency of offers and requests. Study 1 Methods Participants Eighty-five participants (10 males)1 ranging in age from 18 to 65 (M = 30 years) were recruited from a public website to complete an online study for a chance to win $50. Procedure Participants were randomly assigned to identify someone whom they would like to get to know better and befriend (casual friendship condition: N = 42) or whom they knew well and considered a close friend (close friendship condition: N = 43). Half the participants within each condition (casual: N = 21; close: N = 22) were randomly assigned to rate their likelihood of asking the identified person for three types of support as follows: ‘‘If you needed: (1) A ride to the train station and this person had a car, how likely would you be to ask for a ride?, (2) To return a DVD to the video store and this person was running errands in the area, how likely would you be to ask him or her to return the DVD for you?, (3) Someone to pick up your mail while you were away for the week, how likely would you be to ask him or her to pick up your mail?” The remaining participants (casual: N = 21; close: N = 21) rated their likelihood of offering the identified person support (offering condition) using analogous questions (e.g., ‘‘If this person needed a ride to the train station and you had a car, how likely would you be to offer him or her a ride?”). Participants indicated their likelihood of offering or requesting support on seven-point scales (1 = definitely would not offer/ask; 7 = definitely would offer/ask) (see Fig. 1). Results We averaged each participant’s ratings on the three questions to generate a likelihood of offering or requesting support score. To test our hypotheses that people would offer support more often than request it and that this would be more pronounced among casual friends, we conducted a 2 (support: asking, offering) 2 (friendship: casual, close) ANOVA. Results revealed main effects of support, F(1, 81) = 38.08, p < .001, g2p ¼ :32, and friendship, F(1, 81) = 36.59, p < .001, g2p ¼ :31, qualified by an expected support friendship interaction, F(1, 81) = 12.36, p < .01, g2p ¼ :13. Follow-up analyses revealed that participants were more likely to offer than request support from both casual and close friends, F(1, 40) = 33.82, p < .001, g2p ¼ :46, and F(1, 41) = 5.59, p < .05, g2p ¼ :12, respectively. In addition, participants were more likely to request support from close (M = 6.17, SD = .90) than casual friends (M = 4.31, SD = 1.33), F(1, 41) = 29.13, p < .001, g2p ¼ :42, as well as more likely to offer support to close (M = 6.68, SD = .45) than casual friends (M = 6.19, SD = .66), F(1, 40) = 8.00, p < .01, g2p ¼ :17. The interaction was attributable to the asymmetry between willingness to seek versus provide support being more pronounced among casual than close friends.
1 We did not have sufficient power to detect gender differences had they existed in Studies 1 and 2 because participants were predominantly female.
Mean Likeilihood of Asking for/Offering Support
268
7
Asking Offering
6
5
4
3
2
1
Casual
Close Friendship Type
Fig. 1. Study 1: Mean likelihood of asking for or offering support.
Study 2 Methods Participants Participants were 48 undergraduates (12 males) participating for payment or course credit. Data from one suspicious participant were excluded. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 30 (M age = 19 years). Procedure Pairs of friends participated in the laboratory. The experimenter told participants they would pre-test mood manipulations for another study. The pre-tests would be conducted individually or collaboratively. In the collaborative condition (which did not exist, but was described to justify recruiting pairs of friends), participants supposedly would evaluate four types of materials together; in the individual condition, each person would evaluate two types of materials alone. All participants were told they had been assigned to the individual condition and would evaluate one film and one set of written materials; their friend would evaluate a different film and set of written materials. The experimenter explained that one film was a comedy show and one written task was a list of jokes. If participants were assigned one or both of these tasks, they would rate them for clarity and humor. The experimenter remarked that people had really enjoyed these tasks. She explained that the other film was an educational film about the legislative system and the other written task was a list of laws. If participants were assigned one or both of these tasks, they would rate them for clarity and dryness. The experimenter remarked that people had found these tasks boring. Participants were separated into rooms to complete questionnaires, ostensibly to measure their mood, then filled out the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965), the Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire (Downey & Feldman, 1996), the Experiences in Close Relationships Questionnaire-Revised (Fraley, Waller, & Brennan, 2000), and an introversion/extroversion scale (NEO Domain; Goldberg et al., 2006). (Such individual differences may influence willingness to offer or seek support, and we wished to examine that possibility.) Participants classified their relationship with their partner into one of four categories (allowing confirmation that participants were friends): ‘‘I do not know this person well. I do
269
L.A. Beck, M.S. Clark / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) 267–270 Table 1 Logistic regression results Variable
Model 1 B
Constant Support type Friendship type Avoidance Anxiety Self-esteem Extraversion Rejection sensitivity Support friendship type Support avoidance Support anxiety Support self-esteem Support extraversion Support rejection sensitivity Model v2 [df] Block v2 [df]
.511 1.099
Model 2 2
Wald v 1.468 2.526
p
B
.226 .055
3.317 10.869 2.891 .085 3.712 .105 1.476 .944 3.067 .159 4.269 .085 1.221 1.056 17.440 [13] 14.749 [12]
2.69 [1]
not consider us to be close friends, nor would I like us to become close friends” (N = 0); ‘‘I do not know this person well, but I hope to get to know him/her better. I consider us to be casual friends, but I hope we become closer friends” (N = 7); ‘‘I know this person fairly well, and I hope to get to know him/her better. I consider us to be friends, and I hope we become closer friends” (N = 13); ‘‘I know this person well. I am confident that she/he cares about me and I care about her/him. I consider us to be close friends” (N = 28). After several minutes, the experimenter entered one room at random, then the other room. Each participant was told that he or she had completed the questionnaire first, and drew one slip of paper each from two containers to determine the assigned tasks. Drawings were rigged so that participants were assigned independently to receive either two undesirable tasks (educational film and laws) or two desirable tasks (comedy film and jokes). The experimenter remained unaware of participants’ conditions throughout the study. Next, all participants were allowed to trade one task with one of their friend’s tasks, creating an opportunity to request support for participants who had drawn the undesirable tasks (N = 24) or offer support for participants who had drawn the desirable tasks (N = 24). The experimenter explained, ‘‘Because we’re only pretesting mood manipulations at this point, you have the option to switch one of your tasks with one of your friend’s tasks if you happened to draw both boring tasks or both comedic tasks. If you want to keep the tasks you’ve drawn, it doesn’t make any difference to me. If you want, though, you can ask the other person to switch one of his/her tasks with one of yours, or you can offer to switch one of your tasks with one of his/hers if you drew two of the same type of tasks. Would you like to do either of these?” The experimenter recorded offers and requests without knowing condition until an offer or request was made. Once this information had been collected, participants did not need to complete the tasks. The experimenter told participants they need not evaluate the materials, checked for suspicion, and debriefed them. Results Participants arrived in pairs but were independently and randomly assigned to support condition. Participants also made their decisions independently, in separate rooms. We assumed their responses would be independent but because they were members of existing dyads, we first conducted tests of non-independence of the two members’ responses. These were non-significant, z = 1.57, p = .94 (for support type only), and z = 1.71, p = .96 (for
Wald v2 3.785 1.530 2.353 .008 2.434 .315 .339 2.992 1.656 .017 2.861 .136 .152 3.151
p .052 .100 .125 .928 .119 .574 .560 .084 .198 .895 .091 .712 .697 .076
support type, friendship type, self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, attachment, and introversion/extroversion). We used logistic regression to test our hypothesis that people would offer support more often than request support (1 = offered/requested, 0 = did not offer/request; results presented in Table 1). Two models were assessed. The first model included only the randomly assigned variable of support. Model 1 results indicate that people offered support more often than they requested support, B = 1.10, Wald v2 = 2.53, p = .055; the overall model was significant, v2(1, N = 48) = 2.69, p = .05. 62.50% of participants requested support when given the opportunity; 83.33% offered identical support when given the opportunity. Model 2 added covariates of friendship type, self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, attachment, introversion/extroversion, and the interaction of support with each covariate. Model 2 was not an improvement over Model 1, block v2(12, N = 48) = 14.75, p = .26; no interaction or covariate reached significance. Discussion Supporting our primary prediction, Study 1 participants reported more willingness to offer than request identical support, and Study 2 participants offered support more often than they sought identical support. We believe this asymmetry is driven by natural dynamics of forming and strengthening friendships in which desire for connectedness is balanced by need to protect oneself against rejection. Offers of support promote a communal relationship without making oneself vulnerable to rejection. Moreover, offers allow for the partner’s acceptance (increasing the partner’s dependency) and for reciprocal offers which will help a person discern the partner’s trustworthiness and interest in the relationship. If reciprocal offers are forthcoming, the person can risk more relational dependence. In Study 1, as predicted, the asymmetry between offering and seeking support was more pronounced in the casual than close friendship condition. This fits our theoretical perspective. Individuals should worry more about risking vulnerability early in relationships when trust in the partner has not been established. We did not observe this difference in Study 2. This may have been due to low variability in communal strength and established trust within recruited pairs of friends, our relatively insensitive dichotomous measure, and/or the small sample. In Study 2, the predicted asymmetry was not altered by selfesteem, rejection sensitivity, or attachment style. Whereas our perspective would suggest that asymmetry might have been exag-
270
L.A. Beck, M.S. Clark / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) 267–270
gerated when individuals had low self-esteem, were rejection sensitive, or were insecure (and while such effects may emerge in future, more sensitive tests), the fact that they did not obtain here is consistent with the idea that such asymmetry is part of people’s normative risk regulation processes as friendships form and strengthen. Does asymmetry in offering versus requesting support ever disappear? In strong communal relationships with high barriers to leaving (e.g., marriages), it might. In others with strong barriers to leaving and asymmetry in communal responsibility (e.g., parent-child relationships) it likely reverses with one person (e.g., the child) requesting more support from the partner than is provided. Thus, caution is urged in generalizing our results to all communal relationships, as well as to all types of support. Research is needed on dimensions of support that influence these effects. The observed asymmetry may be most pronounced when need for support is particularly suggestive of vulnerability, is socially embarrassing, and/or would be especially costly to the supportgiver. The asymmetry may decrease or disappear for very low cost, mundane types of support (e.g., providing directions) and when situational pressures are such that a person simply cannot take care of his or her own needs. References Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.
Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1979). Interpersonal attraction in exchange and communal relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(1), 12–24. Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1993). The difference between communal and exchange relationships: What it is and is not. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19(6), 684–691. Clark, M. S., & Monin, J. K. (2006). Giving and receiving communal responsiveness as love. In R. J. Sternberg & K. Weis (Eds.), The new psychology of love (pp. 200–221). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Downey, G., & Feldman, S. I. (1996). Implications of rejection sensitivity for intimate relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(6), 1327–1343. Fraley, R. C., Waller, N. G., & Brennan, K. A. (2000). An item response theory analysis of self-report measures of adult attachment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 350–365. Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R., et al. (2006). The international personality item pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(1), 84–96. Holmes, J. G., & Rempel, J. K. (1989). Trust in close relationships. In C. Hendrick (Ed.). Review of personality and social psychology: Close relationships (Vol. 10, pp. 187–219). Newbury Park: Sage. MacDonald, G., & Leary, M. R. (2005). Why does social exclusion hurt? The relationship between social and physical pain. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 202–223. Mills, J., & Clark, M. S. (1982). Exchange and communal relationships. In L. Wheeler (Ed.). Review of personality and social psychology (Vol. 3, pp. 121–144). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Murray, S. L., & Holmes, J. G. (2008). The commitment-insurance system: Selfesteem and the regulation of connection in close relationships. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.). Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 40, pp. 1–60). Amsterdam: Elsevier Press. Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G., & Collins, N. L. (2006). Optimizing assurance: The risk regulation system in relationships. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 641–666. Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the adolescent self-image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jesp
FlashReports
Offering more support than we seek q Lindsey A. Beck *, Margaret S. Clark Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 20 April 2008 Revised 6 August 2008 Available online 22 August 2008 Keywords: Close relationships Support
a b s t r a c t Two studies provide evidence that, in friendships, people offer support to partners more often than they request identical support for themselves. In one study, people reported being more likely to offer different types of support (e.g., a ride to a train station) than to request identical support. This effect was more pronounced for casual than established friendships. In a second study, people assigned randomly to be in a position to give support or to seek identical support from a friend gave more support than they sought. The observed asymmetry is attributed to people balancing desires to establish and strengthen communal relationships against desires to protect the self from rejection, not to people being inherently more unselfish than selfish. Published by Elsevier Inc.
People are admonished that it is better to give than receive. An implication is that they must be urged to give support. Yet we hypothesized that balancing relationship promotion with risk regulation would naturally lead people to be more willing to offer than seek equivalent support in friendships. We tested this hypothesis in two studies. One might think predictions that people will be more likely to give or seek support would concern whether people are primarily selfish, yet we take no position on that issue. Our hypothesis is based on the assumption that people have strong needs for relationships (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) characterized by mutual non-contingent responsiveness to one another’s welfare (Clark & Mills, 1979, 1993; Mills & Clark, 1982; Clark & Monin, 2006) and that it is less threatening to initiate and maintain such relationships by offering support than by seeking it. Although mutual responsiveness can be initiated or maintained by persons offering support (and partners accepting it without feeling compelled to repay) or by persons seeking support (and partners providing it without expecting compensation), we postulate the former strategy is more common. Offering support does not reveal one’s vulnerabilities; seeking support does. If one is unsure of the partner’s care one may fear that revealing vulnerabilities will lead to being seen as weak or needy, to the partner exploiting one’s vulnerabilities, and to one’s request being declined. Having one’s offer of support declined does not suggest a lack of partner care for one’s welfare (and, indeed, may suggest the partner does care and does not
q This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS 9983417. We wish to thank David Kenny for his helpful comments on this manuscript. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (L.A. Beck).
0022-1031/$ - see front matter Published by Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2008.08.004
want one to go to the trouble). In contrast, having one’s request for support declined does suggest a lack of partner care. Offering support conveys one is compassionate and capable and a desirable relationship partner; seeking support may suggest that one is too entitled and needy to make a good relationship partner. Thus, we predict offers will be more frequent than requests for support in symmetrical communal relationships such as friendships. Murray, Holmes, and Collins’ (2006) relationship risk regulation model provides a broader perspective on our rationale. They suggest that desire to seek interpersonal connectedness is balanced by need to protect oneself against rejection. Offering (but not requesting) support can be a means of promoting one’s partner’s interest in (and, if accepted) dependence upon a communal relationship without risking increases in one’s own dependence. Offers allow for the partner’s acceptance (increasing the partner’s dependency) and for voluntary reciprocal offers which help a person discern the partner’s intrinsic motivation to be responsive to the person’s needs. If reciprocal offers are forthcoming, the person can risk more dependence upon the relationship. Requests for support that may interfere with the partner’s own needs represent a more direct and diagnostic means of discerning partner interest (Holmes & Rempel, 1989; Murray & Holmes, 2008). However, we believe such requests are often foregone in lieu of a more cautious ‘‘offer then wait for acceptance and/or reciprocation” strategy to bypass rejection or exploitation of one’s vulnerabilities (MacDonald & Leary, 2005). We suggest that the predicted asymmetry will be most pronounced in early stages of friendships when people are most likely to feel vulnerable and high degrees of trust have not developed. We tested our hypotheses in two studies. In the first, we asked people to report their willingness to request different
L.A. Beck, M.S. Clark / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) 267–270
types of support from a casual or close friend or their willingness to offer identical support to a casual or close friend. In the second, we gave people the opportunity to request or offer identical support to an existing friend and observed the frequency of offers and requests. Study 1 Methods Participants Eighty-five participants (10 males)1 ranging in age from 18 to 65 (M = 30 years) were recruited from a public website to complete an online study for a chance to win $50. Procedure Participants were randomly assigned to identify someone whom they would like to get to know better and befriend (casual friendship condition: N = 42) or whom they knew well and considered a close friend (close friendship condition: N = 43). Half the participants within each condition (casual: N = 21; close: N = 22) were randomly assigned to rate their likelihood of asking the identified person for three types of support as follows: ‘‘If you needed: (1) A ride to the train station and this person had a car, how likely would you be to ask for a ride?, (2) To return a DVD to the video store and this person was running errands in the area, how likely would you be to ask him or her to return the DVD for you?, (3) Someone to pick up your mail while you were away for the week, how likely would you be to ask him or her to pick up your mail?” The remaining participants (casual: N = 21; close: N = 21) rated their likelihood of offering the identified person support (offering condition) using analogous questions (e.g., ‘‘If this person needed a ride to the train station and you had a car, how likely would you be to offer him or her a ride?”). Participants indicated their likelihood of offering or requesting support on seven-point scales (1 = definitely would not offer/ask; 7 = definitely would offer/ask) (see Fig. 1). Results We averaged each participant’s ratings on the three questions to generate a likelihood of offering or requesting support score. To test our hypotheses that people would offer support more often than request it and that this would be more pronounced among casual friends, we conducted a 2 (support: asking, offering) 2 (friendship: casual, close) ANOVA. Results revealed main effects of support, F(1, 81) = 38.08, p < .001, g2p ¼ :32, and friendship, F(1, 81) = 36.59, p < .001, g2p ¼ :31, qualified by an expected support friendship interaction, F(1, 81) = 12.36, p < .01, g2p ¼ :13. Follow-up analyses revealed that participants were more likely to offer than request support from both casual and close friends, F(1, 40) = 33.82, p < .001, g2p ¼ :46, and F(1, 41) = 5.59, p < .05, g2p ¼ :12, respectively. In addition, participants were more likely to request support from close (M = 6.17, SD = .90) than casual friends (M = 4.31, SD = 1.33), F(1, 41) = 29.13, p < .001, g2p ¼ :42, as well as more likely to offer support to close (M = 6.68, SD = .45) than casual friends (M = 6.19, SD = .66), F(1, 40) = 8.00, p < .01, g2p ¼ :17. The interaction was attributable to the asymmetry between willingness to seek versus provide support being more pronounced among casual than close friends.
1 We did not have sufficient power to detect gender differences had they existed in Studies 1 and 2 because participants were predominantly female.
Mean Likeilihood of Asking for/Offering Support
268
7
Asking Offering
6
5
4
3
2
1
Casual
Close Friendship Type
Fig. 1. Study 1: Mean likelihood of asking for or offering support.
Study 2 Methods Participants Participants were 48 undergraduates (12 males) participating for payment or course credit. Data from one suspicious participant were excluded. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 30 (M age = 19 years). Procedure Pairs of friends participated in the laboratory. The experimenter told participants they would pre-test mood manipulations for another study. The pre-tests would be conducted individually or collaboratively. In the collaborative condition (which did not exist, but was described to justify recruiting pairs of friends), participants supposedly would evaluate four types of materials together; in the individual condition, each person would evaluate two types of materials alone. All participants were told they had been assigned to the individual condition and would evaluate one film and one set of written materials; their friend would evaluate a different film and set of written materials. The experimenter explained that one film was a comedy show and one written task was a list of jokes. If participants were assigned one or both of these tasks, they would rate them for clarity and humor. The experimenter remarked that people had really enjoyed these tasks. She explained that the other film was an educational film about the legislative system and the other written task was a list of laws. If participants were assigned one or both of these tasks, they would rate them for clarity and dryness. The experimenter remarked that people had found these tasks boring. Participants were separated into rooms to complete questionnaires, ostensibly to measure their mood, then filled out the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965), the Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire (Downey & Feldman, 1996), the Experiences in Close Relationships Questionnaire-Revised (Fraley, Waller, & Brennan, 2000), and an introversion/extroversion scale (NEO Domain; Goldberg et al., 2006). (Such individual differences may influence willingness to offer or seek support, and we wished to examine that possibility.) Participants classified their relationship with their partner into one of four categories (allowing confirmation that participants were friends): ‘‘I do not know this person well. I do
269
L.A. Beck, M.S. Clark / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) 267–270 Table 1 Logistic regression results Variable
Model 1 B
Constant Support type Friendship type Avoidance Anxiety Self-esteem Extraversion Rejection sensitivity Support friendship type Support avoidance Support anxiety Support self-esteem Support extraversion Support rejection sensitivity Model v2 [df] Block v2 [df]
.511 1.099
Model 2 2
Wald v 1.468 2.526
p
B
.226 .055
3.317 10.869 2.891 .085 3.712 .105 1.476 .944 3.067 .159 4.269 .085 1.221 1.056 17.440 [13] 14.749 [12]
2.69 [1]
not consider us to be close friends, nor would I like us to become close friends” (N = 0); ‘‘I do not know this person well, but I hope to get to know him/her better. I consider us to be casual friends, but I hope we become closer friends” (N = 7); ‘‘I know this person fairly well, and I hope to get to know him/her better. I consider us to be friends, and I hope we become closer friends” (N = 13); ‘‘I know this person well. I am confident that she/he cares about me and I care about her/him. I consider us to be close friends” (N = 28). After several minutes, the experimenter entered one room at random, then the other room. Each participant was told that he or she had completed the questionnaire first, and drew one slip of paper each from two containers to determine the assigned tasks. Drawings were rigged so that participants were assigned independently to receive either two undesirable tasks (educational film and laws) or two desirable tasks (comedy film and jokes). The experimenter remained unaware of participants’ conditions throughout the study. Next, all participants were allowed to trade one task with one of their friend’s tasks, creating an opportunity to request support for participants who had drawn the undesirable tasks (N = 24) or offer support for participants who had drawn the desirable tasks (N = 24). The experimenter explained, ‘‘Because we’re only pretesting mood manipulations at this point, you have the option to switch one of your tasks with one of your friend’s tasks if you happened to draw both boring tasks or both comedic tasks. If you want to keep the tasks you’ve drawn, it doesn’t make any difference to me. If you want, though, you can ask the other person to switch one of his/her tasks with one of yours, or you can offer to switch one of your tasks with one of his/hers if you drew two of the same type of tasks. Would you like to do either of these?” The experimenter recorded offers and requests without knowing condition until an offer or request was made. Once this information had been collected, participants did not need to complete the tasks. The experimenter told participants they need not evaluate the materials, checked for suspicion, and debriefed them. Results Participants arrived in pairs but were independently and randomly assigned to support condition. Participants also made their decisions independently, in separate rooms. We assumed their responses would be independent but because they were members of existing dyads, we first conducted tests of non-independence of the two members’ responses. These were non-significant, z = 1.57, p = .94 (for support type only), and z = 1.71, p = .96 (for
Wald v2 3.785 1.530 2.353 .008 2.434 .315 .339 2.992 1.656 .017 2.861 .136 .152 3.151
p .052 .100 .125 .928 .119 .574 .560 .084 .198 .895 .091 .712 .697 .076
support type, friendship type, self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, attachment, and introversion/extroversion). We used logistic regression to test our hypothesis that people would offer support more often than request support (1 = offered/requested, 0 = did not offer/request; results presented in Table 1). Two models were assessed. The first model included only the randomly assigned variable of support. Model 1 results indicate that people offered support more often than they requested support, B = 1.10, Wald v2 = 2.53, p = .055; the overall model was significant, v2(1, N = 48) = 2.69, p = .05. 62.50% of participants requested support when given the opportunity; 83.33% offered identical support when given the opportunity. Model 2 added covariates of friendship type, self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, attachment, introversion/extroversion, and the interaction of support with each covariate. Model 2 was not an improvement over Model 1, block v2(12, N = 48) = 14.75, p = .26; no interaction or covariate reached significance. Discussion Supporting our primary prediction, Study 1 participants reported more willingness to offer than request identical support, and Study 2 participants offered support more often than they sought identical support. We believe this asymmetry is driven by natural dynamics of forming and strengthening friendships in which desire for connectedness is balanced by need to protect oneself against rejection. Offers of support promote a communal relationship without making oneself vulnerable to rejection. Moreover, offers allow for the partner’s acceptance (increasing the partner’s dependency) and for reciprocal offers which will help a person discern the partner’s trustworthiness and interest in the relationship. If reciprocal offers are forthcoming, the person can risk more relational dependence. In Study 1, as predicted, the asymmetry between offering and seeking support was more pronounced in the casual than close friendship condition. This fits our theoretical perspective. Individuals should worry more about risking vulnerability early in relationships when trust in the partner has not been established. We did not observe this difference in Study 2. This may have been due to low variability in communal strength and established trust within recruited pairs of friends, our relatively insensitive dichotomous measure, and/or the small sample. In Study 2, the predicted asymmetry was not altered by selfesteem, rejection sensitivity, or attachment style. Whereas our perspective would suggest that asymmetry might have been exag-
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gerated when individuals had low self-esteem, were rejection sensitive, or were insecure (and while such effects may emerge in future, more sensitive tests), the fact that they did not obtain here is consistent with the idea that such asymmetry is part of people’s normative risk regulation processes as friendships form and strengthen. Does asymmetry in offering versus requesting support ever disappear? In strong communal relationships with high barriers to leaving (e.g., marriages), it might. In others with strong barriers to leaving and asymmetry in communal responsibility (e.g., parent-child relationships) it likely reverses with one person (e.g., the child) requesting more support from the partner than is provided. Thus, caution is urged in generalizing our results to all communal relationships, as well as to all types of support. Research is needed on dimensions of support that influence these effects. The observed asymmetry may be most pronounced when need for support is particularly suggestive of vulnerability, is socially embarrassing, and/or would be especially costly to the supportgiver. The asymmetry may decrease or disappear for very low cost, mundane types of support (e.g., providing directions) and when situational pressures are such that a person simply cannot take care of his or her own needs. References Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.
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