Everyone's Keeping Score, Everyone's Losing

Understanding the psychology behind reciprocity and what it means for your relationships.

Hey Riff Raff,

Today, I want to share some pretty nifty science on why our calculations of who does what in a relationship often result in both sides feeling underappreciated.

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Picture this: You sacrifice your Saturday morning sleep-in to help your friend move. Three hours of wrestling with an impossibly heavy couch up flights of stairs, they thank you thoroughly… with a bottle of wine.¹

Your internal reaction? “Three hours of my weekend and a sore back… for wine? What am I, a sommelier?”

Meanwhile, your friend is thinking, "Everyone says wine is the perfect way to say thank you!"

Cue your resentment. Then cue your friend’s resentment when they catch wind of how irritated you are.

Sound familiar? You’re both good people: you did something generous, and your friend reciprocated with their own version of generosity. Yet reciprocation often results in a sense of things being totally unfair.

It turns out givers and receivers use different calculators for the same math problem, and neither side thinks to check that we're using the same formulas.

What’s the Deal?

This kind of mismatch in giver effort and receiver benefit happens in all kinds of relationship situations.

• You travel regularly to see family, but they rarely even initiate a phone call.

• You labor over a fancy meal for friends, but they never reciprocate the invitation.

• You listen intently to your partner’s rotten day, but they don’t even ask about how you’re doing.

When researchers study this pattern, they discover something important about how we process social exchanges:

• Givers focus on what it costs them (time, effort, inconvenience).

• Receivers focus on the benefit they gained (problem solved, goal achieved).

This isn't selfish or malicious. It's just how our minds work. And it creates a predictable mismatch:

• You evaluate the reciprocation based on the benefit you received: "Drinking funky grape juice has never been enjoyable for you—you’re more of a Diet Coke connoisseur.”

• They evaluate their reciprocation based on effort expended: "I looked all over for a wine that I thought she would enjoy."

Studies show that this pattern holds up across different types of exchanges, from waiting in line for concert tickets to completing boring laboratory tasks.

Where it gets really interesting (and slightly embarrassing?) is the research showing that when participants were directly asked what should matter most in reciprocity, they gave the "right" answers. Givers said benefits should matter more than costs, and receivers said costs should matter more than benefits.

But our behavior often tells a different story entirely.

This disconnect between what we think we do and what we actually do isn't uncommon. We know far less about our own thought processes than we’d like to admit, particularly when it comes to quick judgments about fairness.²

Why This Matters in Real Life

Do any of the following sound like anyone you know? (Perhaps… you?)

The Overextended Friend: Always feeling like their efforts aren't properly appreciated, gradually becoming the person who keeps mental spreadsheets of favors and starts sentences with "Well, when I helped you that one time..."

The Confused Receiver: Genuinely grateful but unknowingly under-reciprocating, puzzled by their friend's seeming dissatisfaction with their perfectly reasonable thank-you gesture (seriously, that card had a lot of thought put into it!).

The Relationship Drift: Small mismatches in reciprocity expectations accumulating over time, creating distance between people who genuinely care about each other but are somehow failing at friendship math.

Which one (or several) of these descriptions fits you? (I relate to most;)

A Simple Tool to Resolve the Giver-Receiver Gap

In the final experiment of this paper, researchers asked participants to do something simple: think about their thinking. Specifically, they wanted participants to carefully consider the situation from the other person’s perspective.

The result? The gap between giver effort and receiver benefit assessment disappeared almost entirely. What researchers call a process of “unpacking”—that is, reflecting on effort by reflecting on who contributed what—can help undo the egocentric bias we all fall into. Unpacking helps us magnify our own contributions less and reduce how much we minimize others’ efforts.

In this study, when givers were prompted to think about the benefit they provided, and receivers were asked to consider the cost incurred, their reciprocity expectations aligned much better.

Getting meta in our perspective helps eliminate the annoying gap between giver effort and receiver benefit.

Practical Takeaways

• When you’re giving: Remember that your recipient is likely focused on what they gained, not what you sacrificed. Don't expect them to automatically match your sense of effort.

• When you’re on the receiving side: Make an effort to acknowledge what the favor cost your helper, not just what you gained from it.

• For both situations: Ask yourself regularly: "How might this exchange look from the other side?"

For Professionals:

• Therapists can use this framework to help clients understand reciprocity conflicts.

• Coaches can help teams develop more aligned expectations about collaboration.

• Anyone working with relationships can normalize these different perspectives rather than pathologizing them.

The Bottom Line

We're all walking around with slightly different calculators for measuring generosity. The problem isn’t the different perspectives; it’s our lack of awareness about what drives them.

Once we understand that givers naturally attend to costs while receivers focus on benefits, we can bridge the gap with a little intentional perspective-shifting.

The goal isn't perfect reciprocity accounting. It's relationships where both people feel valued and appreciated.

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If this resonated with you, sharing helps more people understand why good intentions sometimes go sideways. And if you didn't like it, well... maybe consider the effort put in versus the entertainment value you received?

Hit that like button if you enjoyed learning that your relationship frustrations aren't personal failings but just poorly calibrated kindness calculators.

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