(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
If you see someone working on a task, should you help them complete it? Perhaps they will fail if you don’t extend a hand. But if they succeed, perhaps they will feel better about having achieved the goal alone than they would have felt if you had helped.
A new research paper examines this common moral dilemma and finds, surprisingly, that the timing of when you offer help plays a central role in determining how the recipient feels about obtaining it.
We are all social creatures inclined to offer aid to those who might need it. But such tendencies can exact psychological costs on the recipients. Prior research has demonstrated that receiving help can make recipients feel dependent, incompetent, indebted, and generally less happy about completing the task they set out to do.
But can timing help mitigate these negative effects from receiving aid? A team of researchers conducted experiments to see how people felt when offered help and then homed in on the timing of the help. They found that those who receive help earlier in a task feel better than those who receive it toward the end.
“Our findings advance the current understanding of how the provision of help can hurt a recipient’s well-being and offer practical insight into when help should be given to minimize such harmful effects,” the researchers write.
The paper’s authors are Min Jung Koo, an associate professor of marketing at South Korea’s SKK Graduate School of Business, Sungkyunkwan University; Suyeon Jung, a PhD student in marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Mauricio Palmeira, an associate professor of marketing at the University of South Florida; and Kyeongheui Kim, also an associate professor of marketing at SKK.
The research question began to form, Koo says, when she and Jung, who was her undergraduate student, began chatting in a seminar about how one might interpret an offer of help. “We said, maybe, when we almost reach the goal, receiving help is really discouraging,” Koo recalls. “Maybe somebody is stealing my thunder before I complete my goal.”
The researchers conducted nine different experiments with subjects performing or hearing a narrative about performing a mundane task, such as building a puzzle, playing Minesweeper, constructing a LEGO dog, solving a Rubik’s Cube, or designing a floral arrangement. In some versions of the experiment, another person offered crucial help early in the task, while in other versions, help came near the end of completion.
“Across nine studies, we show that people experience less happiness and satisfaction when they receive help in a later (versus earlier) stage of an activity,” the researchers found. The team’s experiments revealed that the problem is “psychological ownership”: The person receiving the help feels as though he’s losing ownership of the project, and the later the help arrives, the more he feels control slipping.
The experiments also revealed that recipients are unhappy with help given later on when they’re doing something they intrinsically enjoy or something they feel motivated to finish, but when they’re doing a task that’s required, the same effect doesn’t appear. In addition, the researchers found that solving the problem for recipients makes them feel worse, but that offering tools to help—teaching them to fish rather than giving fish to them—does not make them unhappier.
To achieve this, “you can just give a hint or suggest a way this person can try,” rather than giving the person the answer or taking over the task entirely, Koo says.
The real-world implications of the research can be seen in how companies treat their workers, Koo says. While companies often have important deadlines to meet, managers also need to consider the impact of unsolicited help on employees’ self-confidence. “They may have to give a chance for employees to complete their task, once they start it,” she says.
“This research makes a fascinating contribution to our understanding of the development of psychological ownership and when and how individuals with psychological ownership respond to the actions of others,” said Colleen Kirk, an associate professor of marketing at the New York Institute of Technology School of Management. “In identifying this novel and interesting phenomenon, the researchers have substantively advanced the literature on psychological ownership and human responses to the psychological ownership cues, intended or unintended, of others.”
The paper is relevant to many aspects of life, in part because it takes time for psychological ownership to develop, Kirk says: “This work advances psychological ownership and territoriality research by illustrating that the timing of an infringing individual’s action can impact how psychological owners will respond.”
Min Jung Koo, Suyeon Jung, Mauricio Palmeira, and Kyeongheui Kim, “The Timing of Help: Receiving Help Toward the End (vs. Beginning) Undermines Psychological Ownership and Subjective Well-Being,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July 2022.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.