Mirrored Reciprocation

You’re waiting for an elevator. The doors open. Inside is one solitary stranger whom you’ve never met before. You have three choices for how you behave as you walk in – so goes Peter Kaufman’s idea.

One option is to smile and say “Good morning.” Do that, and 98% of the time the person will smile and say good morning back.

Option two is to “scowl and hiss” at the stranger. 98% of the time, they may not hiss… but they’ll scowl back at you.

The third option is to walk in and do nothing. And what do you get 98% of the time?

Nothing.

This is mirrored reciprocation in action. It’s something we understand to be true in the very core of our being. Newton’s “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” and Twain’s "a man who carries a cat by the tail learns a lesson he can learn in no other way,” describe this in different manners.

In short, you get out what you put in. The world responds in kind. It’s the type of truism that rarely garners a second thought. However, when we fall into the trap of wanting more from life, it’s perhaps the first thing that should cross our minds. What energy, effort and vibe are we creating and expending? Taking a sober and thoughtful look at what we’re putting in, is it realistic for us to feel as if we deserve a different outcome?

Where we place our attention and intention is meaningful. We can work dozens of hours a week but choose not to highlight our efforts. That’s a decision. To then lament the lack of opportunity that falls in our lap is tantamount to a kind of madness.

“The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.” – Ravikant

As the new year approaches, we naturally reflect on how things went the past twelve months. We also project forward into the coming year the things we’d like to achieve. It boils down to the Q Factor once again. Readers of the Musings are undoubtedly doing a lot. As we know, though, humans are biologically wired for habituation. A prehistoric path of protection. As a result of this, so much of our energy is spent keeping the way things have always been. Many people misdirect their effort, desperately attempting to keep doors ajar that’ve been letting in cold gales for years. To really make 2026 any different, we need to knock on new ones until they open.

The Liking Gap

It’s a universal experience to meet someone new and think you made a worse impression than you did. Only In 2018 did psychologists Boothby and Cooney decide to test the situation. The initial study, and subsequent research, consistently bear the same outcome: we think we’re worse than we are. This distance between the effect we believe we have and the effect we actually give is called The Liking Gap.

In defence of mirrored reciprocation, this is essential to keep in mind. Our perceptions of ourselves are off. In each of these five studies covering short, medium and long term, the results found that the individual presumed they were less liked than they actually were. Psychologist Emily Pronin dubs this “the introspection illusion.” We overweight our internal doubts and underweight our observable actions. This highlights just how poor our ability is to gauge our impact. Logically this flows downstream. We think of ourselves as worse than we are, minimise our capacity and drink our own Kool-Aid.

Cialdini’s behaviour reciprocity is one of the most replicated findings in social psychology. Backed by hundreds of experiments, the findings are unequivocal. When we initiate value, we dramatically increase the likelihood of receiving value in return. A leader is far more likely to summon productivity by doing rather than telling. We mirror much more successfully than we listen. Not somewhere down the line. Immediately.

People talk often of our diet, and our media diet. That’s what we put in. What we put out is just as much of a decision, and one we have an equal amount of control over. To understand this is acknowledging a human pattern cemented across eons.

If you want the world to meet you at a higher level in 2026, the move has to factor in mirrored reciprocation.

Next time the lift opens: smile.