[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
The norm of reciprocity is the social rule, named by sociologist Alvin Gouldner in 1960 and found across nearly every studied culture, that people feel obligated to repay benefits they receive. It is the engine behind a wide range of behavioral effects: unsolicited gifts raising compliance, free samples lifting sales, and, in service settings, perceived effort raising valuation. In Operational Transparency and the Labor Illusion, watching a service work on your behalf triggers a felt debt that is distinct from any inference about quality, which is why the effect survives even when the observer half-knows the labor is partly theater. Gratitude is the proximate emotion that mediates the response in Morales’s effort experiments. Seeded from Operational Transparency.