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This question was explored in a paper by Vanessa Bohns, Daniel Newark, and Amy Xu. In their studies, they contrasted simple requests with requests in which a person offered an incentive.
In one study, participants were asked to approach students on a college campus and ask them to vandalize a library book by writing the word pickle in it in pen. They were given a book that looked like a book from the school library. Before approaching students, participants were asked to estimate how many people they would have to approach in order to get three people to write in the book. Participants made these requests in one of two conditions. One was without incentive and another where participants offered people $1 to do it. Participants in this study found that incentive did not affect whether people would actually go along with the request, as they had to approach about 6 people in order to get 3 to write in the book, regardless of whether they were offering a dollar or not.
However, people just making a request predicted they would have to ask at least 11 people in order to get 3 to comply. In contrast, people offering an incentive thought they would need to ask only 7 people to get 3 to comply. That is, people offering the incentive were better calibrated about how likely people were to comply with the request than those who just asked.
A second study in this series demonstrated that this effect is specific to money incentives. This study also had people approach students about vandalizing a book. One group was told to ask. A second group offered a $1 incentive. A third group offered a candy bar. Again, those offering money as an incentive had more accurate guesses as to how many people they would have to ask, while those who only asked and those offering candy bars overestimated how many people they would have to ask.
One final study also looked at people’s attitudes about having to ask for a favor either with or without money. Participants felt like they would be more uncomfortable making a request without offering money, as they felt asking for a favor in the absence of money created an obligation to someone else and so they were asking them to do a bigger favor when there was no money than when they offered an incentive.
These results are important, because many people opt against asking other people for help that they need, because they feel like the request will be asking too much of someone else. Small monetary incentives don’t actually make people more willing to comply with simple requests, so they are having a bigger effect on the person making the request than on the person who is asked to do the favor.
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Source material from Psychology Today