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In the opening chapter, we met an Australian financial adviser named Peter Audet, whose giver style paid off when he took a drive to visit a scrap metal client. But long before that, before he figured out how to be more otherish than selfless, Peter was ripped off by several takers. At twenty-two, he started his career as a financial adviser at a cutthroat company. It was his responsibility to aggressively build an insurance division for a business that primarily served retirement clients. Peter was working weekends to generate six-figure annual revenues, but received a tiny fraction of the revenues, taking home minimum wage of $400 per week. He stayed for nearly three years, and it was the most miserable time of his life. “My boss was greedy. He never recognized what you did, only what he could get from you.” In appreciation of Peter’s services, one of his insurance clients sent him a beautiful Christmas basket. His boss, a wealthy man who drove to work in a Mercedes-Benz, saw the basket and immediately took it home for himself: “I’m the boss, and it’s mine.”

Peter felt like he was drowning, and decided to strike off on his own as a financial adviser. In his first year alone, he quadrupled his salary. But five years later, he was manipulated by another taker. A friendly colleague, Brad, was not doing well at work. Brad landed another position that would start the following week, and he asked Peter for a favor. Would he buy Brad’s clients on two days’ notice so that Brad could afford to leave? As a giver, Peter trusted Brad and agreed on the spot. He purchased Brad’s clients and began forging relationships with them, helping to solve their financial problems.

After a few months, Peter started to lose some of his clients. Strangely, they were all former clients of Brad’s. It turned out that Brad was back in the business as a financial adviser, and he had called every one of the clients who he had sold to Peter. He just wanted to let them know he was back, and they were welcome to switch over to work with him again. Brad stole many of the clients back without paying Peter a dime for them. Peter lost around $10,000 in business.

Had Peter been able to identify Brad from the start as a taker, he might never have gone down that road. Trust is one reason that givers are so susceptible to the doormat effect: they tend to see the best in everyone, so they operate on the mistaken assumption that everyone is trustworthy. In one study, researchers tracked whether Americans had been
victims of crimes
such as fraud, con games, and identity theft. The givers were twice as likely to be victimized as the takers, often as a direct result of trusting takers. One giver was generous enough to cosign for a friend’s car loan, and over a five-year period, the friend opened three credit cards in his identity, stealing more than $2,000.

To avoid getting scammed or exploited, it’s critical to distinguish the genuine givers from the takers and fakers. Successful givers need to know who’s likely to manipulate them so that they can protect themselves. Do we actually know takers when we see them? Many people think they can judge givers and takers in the blink
of an eye. But in reality, they’re wildly inaccurate. Blink
again.

I don’t mean to imply that we fail across the board in
thin slicing
. As Malcolm Gladwell revealed in
Blink
, many of our snap judgments of people are strikingly accurate. At a glance, we can often spot a passionate teacher, an extraverted salesperson, or a married couple in contempt. But we struggle mightily when guessing who’s a genuine giver.

In one study, economists asked a group of Harvard students to predict the giving and taking behaviors of their
close friends
and of complete strangers. The friends and strangers received fifty tokens worth between ten and thirty cents each, and were asked to divide the tokens between themselves and the Harvard students. The Harvard students did no better in predicting how much their friends would give than they did in predicting the behavior of complete strangers. “They correctly expect that friends pass more tokens than strangers,” the researchers write, “but they do not expect more tokens from generous friends compared to selfish friends.” This is a crucial mistake, because the giving friends end up contributing quite a bit more than the takers.

When we try to zero in on a person’s reciprocity signal, it’s easy to be thrown off by plenty of noise. To judge givers, we often rely on personality cues, but it turns out these cues can be misleading. In half a century of research, psychologists have discovered a fundamental personality trait that distinguishes how people tend to appear in their social interactions. It’s called
agreeableness
, and it’s why Peter Audet was fooled by Brad. Like Brad, agreeable people tend to appear cooperative and polite—they seek harmony with others, coming across as warm, nice, and welcoming. Disagreeable people tend to be more competitive, critical, and tough—they’re more comfortable with conflict, coming across as skeptical and challenging.
*

We tend to stereotype agreeable people as givers, and disagreeable people as takers. When a new contact appears affable, it’s natural to conclude that he has good intentions. If he comes across as cold or confrontational, this seems like a sign that he doesn’t care about what’s in our best interests.
*
But in making these judgments, we’re paying too much attention to the shell of a person’s demeanor, overlooking the pearl—or clam—inside the shell. Giving and taking are based on our motives and values, and they’re choices that we make
regardless of whether our personalities trend agreeable or disagreeable
. As Danny Shader, the serial entrepreneur from the opening chapter who initially walked away from David Hornik’s term sheet, explains, “Whether you’re nice or not nice is separate from whether you’re self-focused or other-focused. They’re independent, not opposites.” When you combine outer appearances and inner intentions, agreeable givers and disagreeable takers are only two of the four combinations that exist in the world.

We often overlook that there are disagreeable givers: people who are rough and tough in demeanor, but ultimately generous with their time, expertise, and connections. As an example, Shader mentions the late
Mike Homer
, who ran marketing at Netscape. “He could be crusty as hell on the outside, but on the inside he was pure gold. When push came to shove, he always did the right thing, and he was incredibly loyal.” Greg Sands, a Homer disciple and the managing director of a private equity firm, agrees. “Your fundamental concern is whether people are givers or takers, but you’ve got this other axis, which is are they nice about it—is their fundamental demeanor welcoming? Homer had a hard edge. When he was locked onto a path, something that got in the way of that objective would just get swept away. But he had a big heart, and he wanted to be helpful. He was definitely off the charts on both” giving and disagreeableness. Another one of Homer’s former employees said that Homer “seemed like a taker, because he had incredibly high expectations and demands. But at the end of the day, he really cared about the people. One minute, he was giving me a tough time because his expectations weren’t being met. The next day, he was helping me figure out what I wanted to do next in my career, what was the right next job for me.”

The other counterintuitive combination of appearances and motives is the agreeable taker, otherwise known as a faker. Like Ken Lay at Enron, these people come across as pleasant and charming, but they’re often aiming to get much more than they give. The ability to recognize agreeable takers as fakers is what protects givers against being exploited.

Although they don’t always put their skills to good use, givers have an instinctive advantage in sincerity screening. Research suggests that in general,
givers are more accurate
judges of others than matchers and takers. Givers are more attentive to others’ behaviors and more attuned to their thoughts and feelings, which makes it possible to pick up more clues—such as describing successes with first-person singular pronouns, like
I
and
me
instead of
us
and
we
. Givers also gain a sincerity screening advantage from habitually trusting others, which creates opportunities to see the wide range of behaviors of which other people are capable. Sometimes, givers get burned by takers. In other situations, givers find that their generosity is reciprocated or even exceeded. Over time,
givers become sensitive to individual differences
and shades of gray between the black-and-white boxes of agreeable and disagreeable.

But givers become doormats when they fail to use this fine-tuned knowledge of differences between veneers and motives. The inclination to give first and ask questions later often comes at the expense of sincerity screening. In consulting, Lillian Bauer made a habit of clearing her schedule for virtually anyone who asked, regardless of who they were. When a client asked for a supplementary analysis, even if it wasn’t technically part of the project, she would do it, wanting to please the client. When a junior analyst needed advice, she would immediately open up time in her calendar, sacrificing her personal time.

At Deloitte, Jason Geller intuitively adopted an approach that closely resembles sincerity screening. Geller starts by offering help to every new hire, but in his initial conversations with them, he pays attention to who seems to be a giver versus a taker. “I can’t proactively go and spend time with every single person in the practice globally, so I try to sense who’s genuine and who’s not. Some folks approach the conversation in terms of learning. Others come in and say, ‘I want to get promoted to senior consultant. What should I do?’” Geller assumes these consultants are takers. “They focus on telling me what they’re doing, with a thirty-minute agenda of things they want to update me on, because they want to make me aware. They’re not really asking insightful questions; it’s very superficial. We don’t get deep enough for it to be really helpful for them.”

Over time, as she sacrificed her own interests, Lillian Bauer began to recognize that some people operated like takers: “they’re so self-focused that they will take what they can and move on, so I started being more systematic in how I helped other people.” She started to pay more attention to who was asking and how they treated her, and made a list of reasons to say no. To continue giving but do so more efficiently, she wrote advice guides for engagement managers and associate partners, putting much of her knowledge on paper so she didn’t end up repeating it to takers. “I found that was a more strategic way of being a giver,” Bauer says.
*

Once givers start to use their skills in sincerity screening to identify potential takers, they know when to put up their guard. But sometimes, this awareness sets in too late: givers have already become loyal to a taker. If givers are already trapped in exchanges where they feel concerned for a taker’s interests, how do they protect themselves against the doormat effect?

Several years after Brad stole his clients and his money, Peter Audet was working with a business partner named Rich. When they first paired up, Rich came across as highly agreeable: he was enthusiastic and friendly. But a colleague reflects that “although Rich looked like a giver because he acted supportive, he was really a taker. Peter was a giver, and Rich was sucking everything out of him.” Rich was drawing a high salary, more than $300,000 a year, without contributing much to the financial success of the business. He was living on the Gold Coast of Australia, and he would spend his mornings on the beach, stroll into the office at ten
A.M.
, and go to the pub at midday. “Brad gave me a pretty strong sense of what a taker looked like, and I realized that Rich was a big taker,” Peter laments. “I was always doing extra work, and Rich was absolutely draining the business of money. He didn’t really care about the staff or service to clients; he was starting to pollute the culture. He was taking advantage of me, trading off the back of my loyalty to him because we had built the business up from nothing.”

Peter stayed timid until one Monday, when Rich announced that he had bought a multimillion-dollar house on the Gold Coast. He needed $100,000, and he took it right out of the company account. At a board meeting that day, Rich left early to meet friends at the pub. This was the last straw for Peter; he knew Rich could no longer be trusted, so he promised the board that he would hold Rich accountable. But he had yet to formulate a plan—and he felt guilty and uncomfortable: “Rich was like my big brother.” A colleague said, “It would have been hard for anybody, but I think it was harder because Peter is a giver. He knew what was at the other side of it for Rich, and he wanted to save him from it.”

Peter was a victim of empathy, the powerful emotion that we experience when we imagine another person’s distress. Empathy is a pervasive force behind giving behaviors, but it’s also a major source of vulnerability. When Brad wasn’t doing well and accepted a new job, Peter felt his pain, and bought his clients without hesitation. When he considered how Rich would feel about being ousted, Peter felt sorry for him, and didn’t want to cut him out.

Peter was falling into an empathy trap that’s visible in a classic negotiation study. Researchers brought people together in pairs to negotiate the purchase of electronics products such as TVs.
Half of the negotiating pairs were strangers; the other half were dating couples
. In each pair, one negotiator was the seller, and the other was the buyer. On average, who do you think would achieve more joint profits: the strangers or the dating couples?

I assumed that the dating couples would do better, because they would trust each other more, share more information, and discover opportunities for mutual gains.

But the dating couples did substantially
worse
than the strangers, achieving lower joint profits.

Before the negotiation, the researchers asked the dating couples how in love they were. The stronger their feelings of love, the worse they did.