Giving more nets you less gratitude.
That’s the result of a recent study from researchers at Virginia Tech and the University of Michigan. Their investigation found that bundled gifts (a main gift and a stocking stuffer) were viewed as less generous than unaccompanied gifts (just the main gift). The study’s authors refer to this as the Presenter’s Paradox; givers believe more is better, while receivers average the entire offering, with the lower-valued component dragging down the higher-valued one. But the Presenter’s Paradox has ramifications outside of holiday gift-giving, as the researchers found when they also looked its application to penalties for littering and discovered that study participants found a fine alone to be a harsher punishment than that same fine plus two hours of community service.
Here are three ways you can apply the logic of the Presenter’s Paradox in your daily life – especially on the job - in order to give of yourself without having your generous impulses devalued.
Don’t hedge your bets
Edit your offer. If you’re intent on landing a dream job, strip your resume down to only the most focused and position-specific points and ditch the distracting padding. If someone wants to pick your brain for business wisdom, don’t give them 10 dates and times to choose from and the option of meeting you for coffee, Skype video conferencing and/or shadowing you through the farmers market on your weekly produce run. Name a time that works for you and one alternate and then put the ball back in their court. Don't overwhelm audiences with too much choice or extraneous info that distract from your true intent.
Keep something in the tank
Being indispensible doesn’t earn respect and giving your guts out rarely pays dividends. Once you start trying to be all things to all people (coming in early, staying late, working through lunch, tidying up the conference room), you dilute your original offering (assuming sorting the recycling wasn’t why you were hired) and you establish a precedent that’s hard to go back on. For example, even though he often stays late into the evenings, my own boss sets boundaries by eating lunch at home with his family every day and enforcing a strict No Saturdays policy. As he and I have discussed many times, letting your boundaries slip and going unreasonably above and beyond the call of duty doesn’t brand you a standout so much as a sucker. You can be a team player without becoming the team waterboy.
Play your best card first. And last.
The Presenter’s Paradox shows that people don’t see more as better. More is just more and once you introduce the averaging effect, more opens the door to being perceived as mediocre and unfocused. Whether you’re writing a term paper, building a business case for outsourcing your company's accounts payable function or asking Santa to finally bring you that pony, lead with your best argument. And lead confidently. Focus on making it as airtight as possible - including identifying and preparing responses to any and all objections that may be raised - and forget about drafting 11 other sub-arguments that pull attention from your central platform. Pick a hill to die on and then figure out a strategy for staying alive.
