That result—plus the fact that a reciprocity-based rationale caused the majority to embrace gift taking—implicates the temporarily surfaced rule for reciprocation as a major culprit here. Lastly, these findings tell me that the answer to the question of whether, as a group, MDs are primarily patient-serving or self-serving is . . . yes. They are each, depending on their attentional focus at the time. That’s a conclusion that applies to far more than physicians, whose remarkably elastic preferences serve to illustrate how top-of-mind factors operate on all of us.
