by Adam Grant
Over the next three months, the managers came to regret promoting more than half of the tellers. Of the seventy tellers who were promoted, thirty-three were genuine givers: they sustained their giving after the promotion. The other thirty-seven tellers declined rapidly in their giving. They were fakers: in the three months before the promotion, they knew they were being watched, so they went out of their way to help others. But after they got promoted, they reduced their giving by an average of 23 percent each.
What would it take to nudge people in the giving direction? When Harvard dean Thomas Dingman saw that Harvard students valued compassion but thought others didn’t, he decided to do something about it. For the first time in the university’s four centuries, Harvard freshmen were invited to sign a pledge to serve society. The pledge concluded: “As we begin at Harvard, we commit to upholding the values of the College and to making the entryway and Yard a place where all can thrive and where the exercise of kindness holds a place on a par with intellectual attainment.”
Believing in the power of a public commitment, Dingman decided to go one step beyond inviting students to sign the pledge. To encourage students to follow through, their signatures would be framed in the hallways of campus dorms. A storm of objections quickly emerged, most notably from Harry Lewis, a computer science professor and the former dean of Harvard College. “An appeal for kindness is entirely appropriate,” Lewis responded. “I agree that the exercise of personal kindness in this community is too often wanting,” he wrote on his blog, but “for Harvard to ‘invite’ people to pledge to kindness is unwise, and sets a terrible precedent.”
Is Lewis right?
In a series of experiments led by NYU psychologist Peter Gollwitzer, people who went public with their intentions to engage in an identity-relevant behavior were significantly less likely to engage in the behavior than people who kept their intentions private. When people made their identity plans known to others, they were able to claim the identity without actually following through on the behavior. By signing the kindness pledge, Harvard students would be able to establish an image as givers without needing to act like givers.
Dingman quickly dropped the idea of posting signatures publicly. But even then, evidence suggests that privately signing a kindness pledge might backfire. In one experiment, Northwestern University psychologists randomly assigned people to write about themselves using either giver terms like caring, generous, and kind or neutral terms like book, keys, and house. After the participants filled out another questionnaire, a researcher asked them if they wanted to donate money to a charity of their choosing. Those who wrote about themselves as givers donated an average of two and a half times less money than those who wrote about themselves with neutral words. “I’m a giving person,” they told themselves, “so I don’t have to donate this time.” The kindness pledge might have a similar effect on Harvard students. When they sign the pledge, they establish credentials as givers, which may grant them a psychological license to give less—or take more.
When we’re trying to influence someone, we often adopt an approach that mirrors the Harvard pledge: we start by changing their attitudes, hoping that their behaviors are likely to march in the same direction. If we get people to sign a statement that they’ll act like givers, they’ll come to believe that giving is important, and then they’ll give. But according to a rich body of psychological detective work, this reasoning is backward. Influence is far more powerful in the opposite direction: change people’s behaviors first, and their attitudes often follow. To turn takers into givers, it’s often necessary to convince them to start giving. Over time, if the conditions are right, they’ll come to see themselves as givers.
This didn’t happen to the bank tellers in China: even after three months of helping colleagues, once they got promoted, they stopped giving. Over the past thirty-five years, research launched by Batson and his colleagues shows that when people give, if they can attribute it to an external reason like a promotion, they don’t start to think of themselves as givers. But when people repeatedly make the personal choice to give to others, they start to internalize giving as part of their identities. For some people, this happens through an active process of cognitive dissonance: once I’ve made the voluntary decision to give, I can’t change the behavior, so the easiest way to stay consistent and avoid hypocrisy is to decide that I’m a giver. For other people, the internalization process is one of learning from observing their own behaviors. To paraphrase the writer E. M. Forster, “How do I know who I am until I see what I do?”
In support of this idea, studies of volunteering show that even when people join a volunteer organization to advance their own careers, the longer they serve and the more time they give, the more they begin to view the volunteering role as an important aspect of their identities. Once that happens, they start to experience a common identity with the people they’re helping, and they become givers in that role. Research documents a similar process inside companies: as people make voluntary decisions to help colleagues and customers beyond the scope of their jobs, they come to see themselves as organizational citizens.*
Part of the wisdom behind Freecycle and the Reciprocity Ring is that both of these generalized giving systems encourage giving while maintaining a sense of free choice. Although there’s a strong norm of giving, it’s entirely up to each participant to decide what to give and whom to help. When my Wharton class went through the Reciprocity Ring, as different students chose their own ways to give and peers to help, a distinctive common identity began to develop. “This is a unique group of people at Wharton that cares about each other,” one student said. Although the students were competing for the same jobs in management consulting and investment banking, they started helping one another prepare for interviews, sharing tips and offering advice. After the class ended, a group of students took the initiative to start an alumni listserv so that they could continue helping one another. According to one student, “because of the emphasis on the benefit of giving and helping in our shared community, I’d be far more comfortable and likely to ask for (and probably receive) help from a random member of the alumni group than my other groups.”
At the end of the semester, the cynical student who had questioned whether there were any givers at Wharton quietly approached me. “Somehow,” he said, “everyone in the class became intrinsically motivated to give, and it transcends the class itself.”
9
Out of the Shadows
Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking for a chance to call it in. And some aren’t, but they’re still aware of it—still regard it as a debt. But others don’t even do that. They’re like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return . . . after helping others . . . They just go on to something else . . . We should be like that.
—Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor
A number of years ago, an imposing figure made his mark on the sports world. Well over six feet tall and two hundred pounds, Derek Sorenson was a tough, aggressive competitor who struck fear into the hearts of his opponents. He led his NCAA team to a national championship and went on to play in the pros. After his career was cut short by an injury, he was courted by the finest professional teams in his sport to become a contract negotiator. He would be wheeling and dealing with players and agents in the hopes of building a world-class team.
To sharpen his bargaining skills, Derek enrolled in a negotiation course at a leading business school. During each class session, he had the chance to practice negotiating in a variety of roles, ranging from a pharmaceutical executive trying to buy a manufacturing plant to a condo developer in a heated dispute with a carpenter. In one of his earliest negotiations, Derek bought a property as a real estate investment, and in top taker form, he persuaded the listing agent to sell at a price that went directly against her client’s interests.
On an icy winter evening, Derek played the role of one of four f
ishermen who ran competing businesses. They were overfishing to the point that the resource would become extinct, and they sat down to discuss how they should handle the dilemma. One negotiator suggested that they should split the maximum total fishing in four equal parts. Another proposed a different way of matching based on equity rather than equality: since some of them were running larger operations than others, they should each reduce their fishing by 50 percent. They all agreed that this was a fair solution, and the meeting was adjourned. Now, it was up to each negotiator to make an individual decision about whether to honor the agreement and how much to fish.
Two of the negotiators stuck to their commitments, reducing their fishing by 50 percent. The third operated like a giver: she reduced her fishing by 65 percent. The group was all set to keep the resource intact, but Derek chose not to reduce his fishing at all. He took as much as he could, actually increasing his fishing total and decimating the other three entrepreneurs. Before the group met, Derek had the lowest profits of the four. After he took far more than his share of the harvest, his profits were 70 percent higher than the giver’s and 31 percent higher than those of the other two. When confronted by his colleagues, Derek responded, “I wanted to win the negotiations and destroy my competitors.”
Just a few months later, Derek began a meteoric rise in his career. He was hired by a professional sports team and established a reputation as a dominant negotiator, playing a key role in assembling a team that went on to win a world championship. Derek was promoted in an unusually short period of time and recognized as one of the one hundred most powerful people in his sport—while still in his thirties.
When Derek first started working for his team as a professional negotiator, his job was to manage the budget, identify top prospects, and negotiate contracts with agents to sign new players and keep existing players. Since resources were tight, bargaining like a taker would work to his advantage. Derek began to search for underrated talent, and stumbled upon a gem of a player in the minor leagues. He sat down with the player’s agent to negotiate a contract. True to form, Derek made a lowball offer. The agent was frustrated: several comparable players were earning higher salaries. The agent accused Derek of pushing him around and demanded more money, but Derek ignored the demands and didn’t budge. Eventually, the agent gave in and agreed to Derek’s terms. It was a win for Derek, saving his team thousands of dollars.
But when Derek went home that night, he had an uneasy feeling. “I could just feel through the conversation that he was pretty upset. He brought up a couple points on comparable players, and in the heat of things, I probably wasn’t listening too much. He was going away with a bad taste in his mouth.” Derek decided he didn’t want to end the exchange with the agent on a sour note. So he tore up the contract and met the agent’s original request, giving him thousands of extra dollars for the player.
Was this a wise decision? Derek was costing his team money, and potentially creating a precedent for doing so in other negotiations. Besides, the deal was settled. The agent had agreed to the lowball offer and Derek had achieved his goal. Going back on it hardly seemed like a smart move.
Actually, it was much smarter than it first appeared. When Vanderbilt researchers Bruce Barry and Ray Friedman studied negotiations, they had a hunch that sharper negotiators would get better results, as they could gather and analyze more information, keep track of multiple issues, and generate hidden solutions. In one study, Barry and Friedman obtained data on the intelligence of nearly a hundred MBA students. They measured intelligence using each student’s score on the GMAT, a rigorous test that is widely used in business school admissions to measure quantitative, verbal, and analytical abilities. The participants negotiated in pairs, playing either the developer of a new mall or the representative of a potential store to anchor the mall. After they finished negotiating, they submitted their final agreements, and two experts assessed the value of the deal to each party.
As expected, the joint gains were highest when both parties were very intelligent. Barry and Friedman broke down each party’s gains, expecting to find that the smarter negotiators got better deals for themselves. But they didn’t. The brightest negotiators got better deals for their counterparts.
“The smarter negotiator appears to be able to understand his or her opponents’ true interests and thus to provide them with better deals at little cost to him- or herself,” Barry and Friedman write. The more intelligent you are, the more you help your counterpart succeed. This is exactly what Derek did when he gave the agent more money for the minor league player. He was giving in an otherish way that was low cost to him but high benefit to the agent and the player. A few thousand dollars was small potatoes to his team, but very significant to the player.
What drove Derek to shift in the giver direction? Shortly before the negotiation with the agent, Derek had gained a window into something that mattered deeply to him: his reputation. At the end of the negotiation course, every participant submitted votes for negotiation awards. Derek received zero votes for Most Cooperative, zero for Most Creative, and zero for Most Ethical. In fact, there was only one award for which he received any votes. For this particular award, Derek received the vast majority of the votes. He was the landslide winner for Most Ruthless.
But Derek achieved something more memorable that week. He became the only student in business school history to be voted the Most Ruthless negotiator in a class that he never took. At the same time that he was enrolled in his course, another negotiation class was under way. None of these students in the other class ever sat across the bargaining table from Derek. Some of them had never met him. Yet his reputation spread so quickly that they voted for him as Most Ruthless anyway.
Derek was negotiating the way any reasonable person would in a taker’s world. As a professional athlete, he had learned that if he didn’t claim as much value as possible, he was at risk for becoming a doormat. “It was the team against the player. The team was always trying to take money out of my pocket, so I viewed a negotiation to be a combative process, which produced a winner and a loser,” Derek says. “I had to try to take more and more.” After being anointed the Most Ruthless negotiator by his peers—and a group of strangers—Derek began to reflect on his reciprocity style at the bargaining table. “While I gained a short-term benefit by taking, in the long run I paid. My relationship with a colleague was ruined, and it caused the demise of my reputation,” he said. In the negotiation with the agent, when he ripped up the contract and gave the agent more money, “It built goodwill. The agent was extremely appreciative,” Derek reflects. “When the player came up for free agency, the agent gave me a call. Looking back on it now, I’m really glad I did it. It’s definitely improved our relationship, and helped out our organization. Maybe Most Ruthless is maturing.”
Actually, I believe maturing is the wrong way to describe Derek’s transformation. Maturation implies a process of growth and development, but in a sense, Derek was actually taking a step backward to express core values that he had embraced for years away from the bargaining table. Long before he ever negotiated like a taker, his peers perceived him as a generous, helpful person who would make time for anyone who asked. He spent countless hours providing advice to colleagues who were interested in sports management careers and mentoring young athletes who aspired to follow in his footsteps. Growing up, he was elected captain of virtually every team on which he played, from elementary school through high school, all the way through college. He even became captain as a rookie on his first professional team—players twice his age respected his commitment to putting the team’s interests ahead of his own.
At the bargaining table, Derek’s transition wasn’t about learning a new set of values. It was about developing the confidence and courage to express an old set of values in a new domain. I believe this is true for most people who operate like matchers professionally, and my hope is that others like Derek won’t wait for a Most Ruthless awa
rd to start finding ways to act in the interest of others at work. For Derek these days, a signature form of giving is helping opposing teams gather information about players. Even though they’re competing in a zero-sum sport, he shares knowledge to help rival teams make good decisions about players who have been on his team in the past. “On the field, I want to beat up opposing teams. But off the field, I’m always trying to help them out.”
Today, Derek attributes his success in building a championship-winning professional sports team to his shift from taking toward giving. Yet he still worries about what will happen if people outside his inner circle find out about his shift in the giver direction. In fact, Derek Sorenson is a pseudonym: before sharing his story, he asked me to disguise his identity. “I don’t want it to get out there that I’ve given more money than I needed to a player,” he says.
These fears persist among many successful givers, but they’re not insurmountable. Consider Sherryann Plesse, the financial services executive from the opening chapter who hid the fact that kindness and compassion emerged as her top strengths. When I originally asked her to tell her story, like Derek, she only agreed under the condition that she would remain anonymous. Six months later, she changed her mind. “I’ve started an underground campaign of givers coming out of the closet,” she said. “Being a giver has contributed to my personal and professional success. It’s liberating to talk about it. I’m not afraid anymore.”