by Adam Grant
* It’s worth noting that the pratfall effect depends on the audience’s self-esteem. Powerless communication humanizes the communicator, so it should be most appealing to audiences who see themselves as human: those with average self-esteem. Indeed, Aronson and colleagues found that when competent people make blunders, audiences with average self-esteem respond more favorably than audiences with high and low self-esteem.
* The same pattern showed up in another study, where more than six hundred salespeople responsible for women’s products completed a questionnaire that revealed whether they were givers: did they try to offer the product that was best suited to customers’ needs? When researchers tracked their sales revenue, the givers initially had no advantage. As they came to understand their customers, the givers pulled further and further ahead. By the third and fourth quarters, the givers were bringing in significantly more revenue. The givers gathered more information about customers’ needs and were more flexible in how they responded to customers.
* Part of the reason that intention questions work is that they elicit commitment: once people say yes, they feel compelled to follow through. But interestingly, research suggests that intention questions can work even when people initially say no. The questions trigger reflection, and if the behavior is attractive, some people change their mind and decide to do it.
* Disclaimer: Certain types of disclaimers are riskier than other forms of powerless communication. For example, it’s common for people to start a sentence with “I don’t mean to sound selfish, but . . ." Psychologists have shown that this type of disclaimer backfires: it heightens the expectation that the speaker is going to say something selfish, which leads the listener to search for—and find—information that confirms the speaker’s selfishness.
* Interestingly, when leaders and managers delivered the same message, it didn’t work. The scholarship students were able to speak from firsthand experience about the importance of the callers’ work, and what it meant to them personally. Although we often look to leaders and managers to inspire employees, when it comes to combating giver burnout, there may be an advantage of outsourcing inspiration to the clients, customers, students, and other end users who can attest to the impact of givers’ products and services.
* Research shows that on the job, people who engage in selfless giving end up feeling overloaded and stressed, as well as experiencing conflict between work and family. This is even true in marriages: in one study of married couples, people who failed to maintain an equilibrium between their own needs and their partner’s needs became more depressed over the next six months. By prioritizing others’ interests and ignoring their own, selfless givers exhaust themselves.
* The salutary effects of being otherish may even be visible in our writing. The psychologist James Pennebaker has been able to trace gains in health to the words that people use in their journal entries. “The writings of those whose health improved showed a high rate of the use of I-words on one occasion and then high rates of the use of other pronouns on the next occasion, and then switching back and forth in subsequent writings,” Pennebaker explains in The Secret Life of Pronouns, such that “healthy people say something about their own thoughts and feelings in one instance and then explore what is happening with other people before writing about themselves again.” The people whose journal entries are purely selfish or selfless, on the other hand, are much less likely to show health improvements.
* The optimal number of hours per year may drop below one hundred as we age. In one study of American adults over sixty-five, those who volunteered between one and forty hours in 1986 were more likely to be alive in 1994 than those who volunteered zero or more than forty hours. This was true even after controlling for health conditions, physical activity, religion, income, and a host of other factors that might influence survival.
* Interestingly, the emotional boost from giving doesn’t always kick in right away. When psychologist Sabine Sonnentag and I surveyed European firefighters and rescue workers, we found that on days when they had a substantial positive impact on others, they were energized at home after work, but not during work. Seeing their impact helped them experience greater meaning and mastery, but it was only after reflecting on the impact of their actions that they experienced the full charge from giving.
* There’s a catch: as people get richer, they give more money in total, but they give smaller fractions of their annual income. In one study, psychologists demonstrated that merely thinking about socioeconomic status is enough to change the amount of charitable giving that we think is appropriate. When people thought about themselves as somewhere in the middle of the wealth ladder, they felt obligated to give 4.65 percent of their annual income to charity. But when they imagined themselves at the top of the ladder, they only reported an obligation to give 2.9 percent of their annual income to charity. Similar trends can be found in the real world: in the United States, households making less than $25,000 a year donate 4.2 percent of their income to charity. Households making more than $100,000 a year donate just 2.7 percent of their income to charity.
* New research shows that these tendencies are heavily influenced by biological forces. In one study, psychologists used MRI to scan the brains of people who reported being agreeable versus disagreeable on a survey. The agreeable people had greater volume in the regions of the brain that process the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others, such as the posterior cingulate cortex. According to behavioral geneticists, at least a third of agreeableness, and possibly more than half, is heritable—attributable to genes. Whether people have an agreeable or disagreeable personality seems to be at least partially hardwired.
* Psychologists originally made the same mistake, including characteristics such as being altruistic within the broad trait of agreeableness. More recent research has shown that (a) compassion and politeness are two separate aspects of agreeableness, (b) the compassion dimension is more related to honesty and humility than to agreeableness, and (c) agreeableness can be distinguished from giver values. Throughout the book, I’ve taken care to focus primarily on studies that were explicitly designed to investigate giving, taking, or matching. At a few points, though, I have used studies of agreeableness to capture givers in places where survey items directly reference giving, like “I love to help others.”
* In this chapter, at the request of interviewees, I’ve disguised the identities of several key characters. Lillian Bauer is a pseudonym, as are Brad and Rich in Peter Audet’s story, and Sameer Jain, a man you’ll meet later.
* This raises a broader question: are women more likely to be givers than men? Northwestern University psychologist Alice Eagly and her colleagues have systematically analyzed hundreds of studies on giving behaviors such as helping, sharing, comforting, guiding, rescuing, and defending others. It turns out that when we study their behaviors, men and women are equally likely to be givers. They just give in different ways. On the one hand, in close relationships, women tend to be more giving than men. On average, women are more likely than men to donate organs to family members, assist coworkers, and mentor subordinates, and female physicians tend to give greater emotional support to patients than male physicians. On the other hand, when it comes to strangers, men are more likely to act like givers. On average, men are more likely than women to help in emergencies and risk their lives to save strangers. When women give more than men, it appears to be a function of motivation rather than ability. Research shows that women are better than men at reading other people’s thoughts and feelings, but only when told that their empathy is being tested
* Although there’s consistent evidence that a lack of assertiveness is one reason for the giver pay disadvantage, there’s a second factor at play. Givers often choose lower-paying careers: they’re willing to make less of a living in order to make more of a difference. One recent study replicated the basic finding that givers earn lower incomes even after accounting for the occupations in which they work, but this reduced the disadvantage—suggestin
g that part of the difference is due to givers’ accepting lower-paying jobs. To illustrate, Cornell economist Robert Frank found that employees in the most socially responsible occupations earned annual salaries of approximately 30 percent less than those in the middle and 44 percent less than those at the bottom of the social responsibility spectrum. Private-sector employees earned annual salaries averaging 21 percent higher than government employees, who in turn were 32 percent above nonprofit employees. Guess who’s more likely to end up in government and nonprofit jobs? The givers. In one amusing study, Frank asked economics students to consider doing the exact same job in two different organizations: one with strong giver values and one . . . less so. The students reported that they would accept 50 percent lower salaries to work as an advertising copywriter for the American Cancer Society than for Camel cigarettes, 17 percent lower salaries to work as an accountant at an art museum than at a petrochemical company or as a recruiter at the Peace Corps than Exxon Mobil, and 33 percent lower salaries as a lawyer for the Sierra Club than for the National Rifle Association. Interestingly, men were less willing to sacrifice their salaries than women. Of course, whether the participants would show these preferences in their actual behavior is another matter—but I’m willing to bet that selfless givers are more likely to do so than otherish givers.
* Only later did I learn that my manager hired me because my predecessor had quit three weeks into the job, and she was desperate to find a replacement. The position had been open for twenty-two days, and I was the sole candidate.
* Many Craigslist pages do have a section for giving away free items, but its popularity is dwarfed by that of the buying and selling pages.
* When he wore the T-shirt of a rival soccer team, Liverpool FC, 30 percent helped, which raises the question of whether it’s possible to get people to help a rival. Before the staged emergency, the fans had written about why Manchester United was their favorite team, how long they had supported the team, how often they watched the team play, and how they felt when the team won and lost. The fans were thinking about themselves as Manchester United fans, so the vast majority of them didn’t want to help their enemy. But the psychologists had a trick up their sleeves. In another version of the study, instead of writing about why they loved Manchester United, the fans wrote about why they were soccer fans, what it meant to them, and what they had in common with other fans. When the runner twisted his ankle, the fans were still much more likely to help if he was wearing a Manchester United T-shirt (80 percent) than a plain T-shirt (22 percent). But when he was wearing the T-shirt of their rival, Liverpool FC, 70 percent helped. When we look at a rival as a fellow soccer fan, rather than as an enemy, we can identify with him. Oftentimes, we fail to identify with people because we’re thinking about ourselves—or them—in terms that are too specific and narrow. If we look more broadly at commonalities between us, it becomes much easier to see giving as otherish.
* There are plenty of alternative explanations for many of these findings. Wharton professor Uri Simonsohn has scrutinized the data, and although he believes that name similarity can influence our decisions, he argues persuasively that many of the existing studies have been biased by other factors. For example, he finds that people named Dennis are overrepresented among lawyers, not only dentists. But this doesn’t explain why randomized, controlled experiments show that people help others with similar names, buy products that match their initials, and are attracted to dates who share their initials—and it doesn’t account for some recent studies on how names can sabotage success. Psychologists have found that on average, people whose names start with A and B get better grades and are accepted to higher-ranked law schools than people whose names start with C and D—and that professional baseball players whose names start with K, the symbol for strikeouts, strike out 9 percent more often than their peers. The speculation here is that people are more comfortable with negative outcomes that subtly remind them of themselves. Other evidence lends tentative support to this idea: athletes, doctors, and lawyers whose first names start with D die sooner than those with other initials. Professional baseball players with positive initials (A.C.E., J.O.Y., W.O.W.) live an average of thirteen years longer than players with negative initials (B.U.M., P.I.G., D.U.D.). And in California between 1969 and 1995, compared with neutral initials, women with positive initials lived an average of 3.4 years longer, men with positive initials lived an average of 4.5 years longer, and men with negative initials died an average of 2.8 years earlier. Consistent with the idea that initials affect how we take care of ourselves, people with positive initials have lower accident and suicide rates, which are higher for people with negative initials.
* Ironically, the message backfired for the people who were conserving energy in a giver fashion. Once they saw they were below the norm for electricity consumption, they felt licensed to take more, and actually increased their consumption by an average of 0.89 kilowatt-hours per day. The psychologists were able to prevent this unintended consequence by drawing a next to the information that households were consuming less than average. Apparently, this small signal of social approval was enough to motivate people to continue acting like givers.
* Interestingly, even though people of any reciprocity style can internalize a giving identity, there’s still a difference between givers and takers. In one study at a Fortune 500 retail company with colleagues Jane Dutton and Brent Rosso, I found that when people gave to help coworkers, they were more likely to see themselves as helpful, generous, and caring people. This is the pattern that emerges for true givers: repeated acts of voluntary helping contribute to the development of a giver identity in general. For takers, though, the giver identity that develops may not translate to other roles or organizations. They might become a giver on Freecycle, but when they join another organization, they shift back to taking until they internalize that organization’s identity. As we saw earlier, the more the organization provides a sense of optimal distinctiveness, the faster that identification tends to occur.
* Interestingly, it was a shift from taking toward giving that appeared to elevate Jordan’s success as a player. When Jordan played for the Chicago Bulls, his coach Phil Jackson emphasized that if Jordan focused on “making his team members more successful, he would expand his impact and ultimate success, and thereby become the best individual basketball player and also the leader of the best basketball team,” writes Stephen Roulac. Jordan became “more giver than taker,” Roulac explains, and “became even more dominant and prominent. As he did less alone, when game circumstances dictated the appropriateness of more selfish play, he was even more effective.”
* New research shows that when employees spend a great deal of time helping colleagues, it only detracts from their productivity if they lack time management skills. When employees have strong time management skills, the more they help others, the more productive they are—perhaps in part due to the energy benefits.
* Away from the bargaining table, empathy isn’t always as costly as it seems. In one study, veterinarians who empathized with their customers charged them lower prices. However, after taking pricing out of the equation, the empathetic veterinarians had higher income, presumably because they attracted greater loyalty and more referrals from customers.
* This evidence sheds new light on the role of gender in the success of givers. Unfortunately, evidence suggests that giving is sometimes more rewarding for men than women. Whereas people are often surprised when men help, they tend to take it for granted when women give, which fits in with female gender role expectations. However, the research by Judge and colleagues complicates this picture by revealing that when men are too generous, they’re punished more than women, incurring nearly triple the salary penalty—perhaps because they violate norms of masculinity. Rather than assuming that giving is a better deal for men than women, I believe that gender may be an amplifier of giver success and failure: giving benefits successful men more than women, but costs unsuccessful men more tha
n women.
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