Give first, and the debt will ask for you.
Regan's 1971 experiment is chapter 1, and the finding to hold on to is not that the Coca-Cola raised compliance. It is that it destroyed the relationship between liking and compliance. Among subjects who received no favor, liking predicted purchases. Among those who did, it stopped mattering. Obligation had overridden evaluation.
Gouldner's argument for why this is available is that the norm of reciprocity is close to universal and is enforced by real social penalty: every language has words for the person who takes and does not return, and none of them are compliments. The obligation is therefore not a preference. It is a rule the target has internalized and is uncomfortable breaking.
The Hare Krishna solicitation that Cialdini documents is the purest deployment. Airport travelers were given a flower — pressed into their hands, and refused when they tried to return it — and only afterwards asked for a donation. It outperformed direct appeals substantially, and it did so on people who did not want the flower, frequently disliked the solicitor, and discarded the flower in the nearest bin, from which it was retrieved and reused.
The operational specification has three parts, and each is doing distinct work.
The gift must be unrequested, because a requested favor is a transaction and is priced. An unrequested one is a debt of unspecified size.
It must be small relative to what will be asked, because the return is governed by the felt obligation rather than by the value.
And it must precede the request, closely enough to be connected and not so closely that the connection is obvious.
The technique's efficiency is that it costs almost nothing. A drink, a sample, a piece of advice, a favor done unasked, twenty minutes of unexpected help.
The boundary is the point at which the gift is calibrated rather than given. Generosity that is genuinely generous does not track a subsequent ask, and the practitioner knows perfectly well which one they are doing. Systematically manufacturing obligation in people who have not asked for anything — free samples in pharmaceutical detailing, gifts to procurement officers, hospitality to regulators — is why most professions have rules about it, and the rules exist because the mechanism does not care whether the recipient approves of it.
The counter is chapter 307.
Countered by The Gift With Strings