by Adam Grant
Jonas Salk became an international hero. But at the historic 1955 press conference, Salk gave a valedictory speech that jeopardized his relationships and his reputation in the scientific community. He didn’t acknowledge the important contributions of Enders, Robbins, and Weller, who had won a Nobel Prize a year earlier for their groundbreaking work that enabled Salk’s team to produce the vaccine. Even more disconcertingly, Salk gave no credit to the six researchers in his lab who were major contributors to his efforts to develop the vaccine—Byron Bennett, Percival Bazeley, L. James Lewis, Julius Youngner, Elsie Ward, and Francis Yurochko.
Salk’s team left the press conference in tears. As historian David Oshinsky writes in Polio: An American Story, Salk never acknowledged “the people in his own lab. This group, seated proudly together in the packed auditorium, would feel painfully snubbed. . . . Salk’s coworkers from Pittsburgh . . . had come expecting to be honored by their boss. A tribute seemed essential, and long overdue.” This was especially true from a matcher’s perspective. One colleague told a reporter, “At the beginning, I saw him as a father figure. And at the end, an evil father figure.”
Over time, it became clear that Julius Youngner felt particularly slighted. “Everybody likes to get credit for what they’ve done,” Youngner told Oshinsky. “It was a big shock.” The snub fractured their relationship: Youngner left Salk’s lab in 1957 and went on to make a number of important contributions to virology and immunology. In 1993, they finally crossed paths at the University of Pittsburgh, and Youngner shared his feelings. “We were in the audience, your closest colleagues and devoted associates, who worked hard and faithfully for the same goal that you desired,” Youngner began. “Do you remember whom you mentioned and whom you left out? Do you realize how devastated we were at that moment and ever afterward when you persisted in making your coworkers invisible?” Youngner reflected that Salk “was clearly shaken by these memories and offered little response.”
Jonas Salk’s moment of taking sole credit haunted him for the rest of his career. He launched the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where hundreds of researchers continue to push the envelope of humanitarian science today. But Salk’s own productivity waned—later in his career, he tried unsuccessfully to develop an AIDS vaccine—and he was shunned by his colleagues. He never won a Nobel Prize, and he was never elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.* “In the coming years, almost every prominent polio researcher would gain entrance,” Oshinsky writes. “The main exception, of course, was Jonas Salk. . . . As one observer put it, Salk had broken the ‘unwritten commandments’ of scientific research,” which included “Thou shalt give credit to others.” According to Youngner, “People really held it against him that he had grandstanded like that and really done the most un-collegial thing that you can imagine.”
Salk thought his colleagues were jealous. “If someone does something and gets credit for it, then there is this tendency to have this competitive response,” he acknowledged in rare comments about the incident. “I was not unscathed by Ann Arbor.” But Salk passed away in 1995 without ever acknowledging the contributions of his colleagues. Ten years later, in 2005, the University of Pittsburgh held an event to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the vaccine announcement. With Youngner in attendance, Salk’s son, AIDS researcher Peter Salk, finally set the record straight. “It was not the accomplishment of one man. It was the accomplishment of a dedicated and skilled team,” Peter Salk said. “This was a collaborative effort.”
It appears that Jonas Salk made the same mistake as Frank Lloyd Wright: he saw himself as independent rather than interdependent. Instead of earning the idiosyncrasy credits that George Meyer attained, Salk was penalized by his colleagues for taking sole credit.
Why didn’t Salk ever credit the contributions of his colleagues to the development of the polio vaccine? It’s possible that he was jealously guarding his own accomplishments, as a taker would naturally do, but I believe there’s a more convincing answer: he didn’t feel they deserved credit. Why would that be?
The Responsibility Bias
To understand this puzzle, we need to take a trip to Canada, where psychologists have been asking married couples to put their relationships on the line. Think about your marriage, or your most recent romantic relationship. Of the total effort that goes into the relationship, from making dinner and planning dates to taking out the garbage and resolving conflicts, what percentage of the work do you handle?
Let’s say you claim responsibility for 55 percent of the total effort in the relationship. If you’re perfectly calibrated, your partner will claim responsibility for 45 percent, and your estimates will add up to 100 percent. In actuality, psychologists Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly found that three out of every four couples add up to significantly more than 100 percent. Partners overestimate their own contributions. This is known as the responsibility bias: exaggerating our own contributions relative to others’ inputs. It’s a mistake to which takers are especially vulnerable, and it’s partially driven by the desire to see and present ourselves positively. In line with this idea, Jonas Salk certainly didn’t avoid the spotlight. “One of his great gifts,” Oshinsky writes, “was a knack for putting himself forward in a manner that made him seem genuinely indifferent to his fame. . . . Reporters and photographers would always find Salk grudging but available. He would warn them not to waste too much of his time; he would grouse about the important work they were keeping him from doing; and then, having lodged his formulaic protest, he would fully accommodate.”
But there’s another factor at play that’s both more powerful and more flattering: information discrepancy. We have more access to information about our own contributions than the contributions of others. We see all of our own efforts, but we only witness a subset of our partners’ efforts. When we think about who deserves the credit, we have more knowledge of our own contributions. Indeed, when asked to list each spouse’s specific contributions to their marriage, on average, people were able to come up with eleven of their own contributions, but only eight of their partners’ contributions.
When Salk claimed sole credit for the polio vaccine, he had vivid memories of the blood, sweat, and tears that he invested in developing the vaccine, but comparatively little information about his colleagues’ contributions. He literally hadn’t experienced what Youngner and the rest of the team did—and he wasn’t present for the Nobel Prize–winning discovery that Enders, Robbins, and Weller made.
“Even when people are well intentioned,” writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, “they tend to overvalue their own contributions and undervalue those of others.” This responsibility bias is a major source of failed collaborations. Professional relationships disintegrate when entrepreneurs, inventors, investors, and executives feel that their partners are not giving them the credit they deserve, or doing their fair share.
In Hollywood, between 1993 and 1997 alone, more than four hundred screenplays—roughly a third of all submitted—went to credit arbitration. If you’re a taker, your driving motivation is to make sure you get more than you give, which means you’re carefully counting every contribution that you make. It’s all too easy to believe that you’ve done the lion’s share of the work, overlooking what your colleagues contribute.
George Meyer was able to overcome the responsibility bias. The Simpsons has contributed many words to the English lexicon, the most famous being Homer’s d’oh! response to an event that causes mental or physical anguish. Meyer didn’t invent that word, but he did coin yoink, the familiar phrase that Simpsons characters utter when they snatch an item from another character’s hands. In 2007, the humor magazine Cracked ran a feature on the top words created by The Simpsons. Making the list were classics like cromulent (describing something that’s fine, acceptable, or illegitimately legitimate) and tomacco (a crossbreed of tomato and tobacco made by Homer, first suggested in a 1959 Scientific American piece, and actual
ly crossbred in 2003 by a Simpsons fan named Rob Bauer). But the top invented word on the list was meh, the expression of pure indifference that debuted in the sixth season of the show. In one episode, Marge Simpson is fascinated by a weaving loom at a Renaissance Fair, having studied weaving in high school. She weaves a message: “Hi Bart, I am weaving on a loom.” Bart’s response: “meh.” Six years later, an episode aired in which Lisa Simpson actually spells out the word.
Meh has appeared in numerous dictionaries, from Macmillan (“used for showing that you do not care what happens or that you are not particularly interested in something”) to Dictionary.com (“an expression of boredom or apathy”) to Collins English Dictionary (“an interjection to suggest indifference or boredom—or as an adjective to say something is mediocre or a person is unimpressed”). Several years ago, George Meyer was caught by surprise when a Simpsons writer shared a memory with him about the episode in which meh first appeared. “He reminded me I had worked on that episode, and he thought I came up with the word meh. I didn’t remember it.” When I asked Tim Long who created meh, he was pretty confident it was George Meyer. “I’m almost sure he invented meh. It’s everywhere—most people don’t even realize it started with The Simpsons.” Eventually, conversations with writers jogged Meyer’s memory. “I was trying to think of a word that would be the easiest word to say with minimal effort—just a parting of the lips and air would come out.”
Why didn’t Meyer have a better memory of his contributions? As a giver, his focus was on achieving a collective result that entertained others, not on claiming personal responsibility for that result. He would suggest as many lines, jokes, and words as possible, letting others run with them and incorporate them into their scripts. His attention centered on improving the overall quality of the script, rather than on tracking who was responsible for it. “A lot of the stuff is just like a basketball assist. When somebody would say, ‘George, that was yours,’ I genuinely did not know,” Meyer says. “I tended to not be able to remember the stuff that I had done, so I wasn’t always saying when I did this and that. I was saying when we did this and that. I think it’s good to get into the habit of doing that.”
Research shows that it’s not terribly difficult for matchers and takers to develop this habit. Recall that the responsibility bias occurs because we have more information about our own contributions than others’. The key to balancing our responsibility judgments is to focus our attention on what others have contributed. All you need to do is make a list of what your partner contributes before you estimate your own contribution. Studies indicate that when employees think about how much help they receive from their bosses before thinking about how much they contribute to their bosses, their estimates of their bosses’ contributions double, from under 17 percent to over 33 percent. Bring together a work group of three to six people and ask each member to estimate the percentage of the total work that he or she does. Add up their estimates, and the average total is over 140 percent. Ask them to reflect on each member’s contributions before their own, and the average total drops to 123 percent.
Givers like Meyer do this naturally: they take care to recognize what other people contribute. In one study, psychologist Michael McCall asked people to fill out a survey measuring whether they were givers or takers, and to make decisions in pairs about the importance of different items for surviving in the desert. He randomly told half of the pairs that they failed and the other half that they succeeded. The takers blamed their partners for failures and claimed credit for successes. The givers shouldered the blame for failures and gave their partners more credit for successes.
This is George Meyer’s modus operandi: he’s incredibly tough on himself when things go badly, but quick to congratulate others when things go well. “Bad comedy hurts George physically,” Tim Long says. Meyer wants each joke to make people laugh—and many to make them think. Although he holds other people to the same high standards that he sets for himself, he’s more forgiving of their mistakes. Early in his career, Meyer was fired from a show called Not Necessarily the News after six weeks. Twenty years later, he ran into the boss who fired him. She apologized—firing him was clearly a mistake—and braced herself for Meyer to be angry. As he shared the story with me, Meyer laughed: “It was just lovely to see her again. I said ‘Come on, look where we are; all is forgiven.’ There are a few people in Hollywood who thrive on driving their enemies’ faces into the dirt. That’s such a hollow motivation. And you don’t want to have all these people out there trying to undermine you.”
In the Simpsons rewrite room, being more forgiving of others than of himself helped Meyer get the best ideas out of others. “I tried to create a climate in the room where everybody feels that they can contribute, that it’s okay to fall on your face many, many times,” he says. This is known as psychological safety—the belief that you can take a risk without being penalized or punished. Research by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson shows that in the type of psychologically safe environment that Meyer helped create, people learn and innovate more.* And it’s givers who often create such an environment: in one study, engineers who shared ideas without expecting anything in return were more likely to play a major role in innovation, as they made it safe to exchange information. Don Payne recalls that when he and fellow writer John Frink joined The Simpsons, they were intimidated by the talented veterans on the show, but Meyer made it safe to present their ideas. “George was incredibly supportive, and took us under his wing. He made it very easy to join in and participate, encouraged us to pitch and didn’t denigrate us. He listened, and asked for our opinions.”
When revising scripts, many comedy writers cut material ruthlessly, leaving the people who wrote that material psychologically wounded. Meyer, on the other hand, says he “tried to specialize in the emotional support of other people.” When writers were freaking out about their scripts being rewritten, he was often the one to console them and calm them down. “I was always dealing with people in extremis; I would often talk people down from panic,” Meyer observes. “I got good at soothing them, and showing them a different way to look at the situation.” At the end of the day, even if he was trashing their work, they knew he cared about them as people. Carolyn Omine comments that “George does not mince words; he’ll come right out and tell you if he thinks the joke you pitched is dumb, but you never feel he’s saying you’re dumb.” Tim Long told me that when you give Meyer a script to read, “It’s as if you just handed him a baby, and it’s his responsibility to tell you if your baby’s sick. He really cares about great writing—and about you.”
The Perspective Gap
If overcoming the responsibility bias gives us a clearer understanding of others’ contributions, what is it that allows us to offer support to colleagues in collaborations, where emotions can run high and people often take criticism personally? Sharing credit is only one piece of successful group work. Meyer’s related abilities to console fellow writers when their work was being cut, and to create a psychologically safe environment, are a hallmark of another important step that givers take in collaboration: seeing beyond the perspective gap.
In an experiment led by Northwestern University psychologist Loran Nordgren, people predicted how painful it would be to sit in a freezing room for five hours. They made their predictions under two different conditions: warm and cold. When the warm group estimated how much pain they would experience in the freezing room, they had an arm in a bucket of warm water. The cold group also made their judgments with an arm in a bucket, but it was filled with ice water. Which group would expect to feel the most pain in the freezing room?
As you probably guessed, it was the cold group. People anticipated that the freezing room would be 14 percent more painful when they had their arm in a bucket of ice water than a bucket of warm water. After literally feeling the cold for a minute, they knew several hours would be awful. But there was a third group of people who experienced cold
under different circumstances. They stuck an arm in a bucket of ice water, but then took the arm out and filled out a separate questionnaire. After ten minutes had passed, they estimated how painful the freezing room would be.
Their predictions should have resembled the cold group’s, having felt the freezing temperature just ten minutes earlier, but they didn’t. They were identical to the warm group. Even though they had felt the cold ten minutes earlier, once they weren’t cold anymore, they could no longer imagine it. This is a perspective gap: when we’re not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state, we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us. For instance, evidence shows that physicians consistently think their patients are feeling less pain than they actually are. Without being in a state of pain themselves, physicians can’t fully realize what it’s like to be in that state.
In a San Francisco hospital, a respected oncologist was concerned about a patient. “He’s not as mentally clear as he was yesterday.” The patient was old, and he had advanced metastatic cancer. The oncologist decided to order a spinal tap to see what was wrong, in the hopes of prolonging the patient’s life. “Maybe he has an infection—meningitis, a brain abscess—something treatable.”