Study: Give or take $5, people respond differently

— -- In the holiday season, some folks might quibble with the notion that it is better to give than receive. But what about taking?

"Nobody likes that," says psychologist Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago.

In experiments described in the Psychological Science journal, Keysar and colleagues played a game with volunteers to see how they responded to being given cash or having it taken away.

Walkie-talkie-equipped study researchers approached 100 people on a Chicago beach and asked them to participate in an experiment. In one group, each player was given an envelope with $10 and told that another unseen person was going to take some of that money. Ostensibly, the amount was determined by a random number drawn from a hat and conveyed by walkie-talkie, but in reality, the amount taken was always $5.

In the other group, each player was told that another, unseen person had an envelope with $10 and was going to give some of that money to him or her. Again, the amount given was $5.

Then the members of each group were told that they were being given $10 but were asked to give some of that money to the unseen person.

People who had just been unexpectedly "given" cash typically decided to hand over $6 to the other person. But, even though they knew it was just a game, the people who had cash "taken" from them gave just about $4.50.

"People perceive an intention to harm them from the taking side, and they act on it to punish the other person," says social psychologist David Schroeder of the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, who was not part of the study. No surprise there, he says, "but a lot of these 'duh' ideas turn out not to work that way when they are studied. This one very clearly does."

Keysar suggests that "the lesson from the study is, you probably need to do more than you think to make up to a person who feels slighted. It's not enough to just apologize."