B00AFPTSI0 EBOK (48 page)

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Skender compulsively makes lists of everything, from his favorite songs to the ten best days of his life, and arranges the dollar bills in his wallet according to the order of their serial numbers. He owns more than eight hundred pairs of suspenders, each of which has a unique name and number. He alphabetizes his socks and his underwear and lays out his clothes weeks in advance. For more than two decades, he has worn a bow tie every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday—even when mowing his lawn. He is religious about being the first to arrive in his parking garage at work, usually before five
A.M.
, yet he is known for staying past midnight at review sessions to help students prepare for exams. He translates his advice about reciprocity into the language of accounting: “I’d rather have a large accounts receivable than a large accounts payable.” To put his teaching load in perspective, a typical college professor teaches between three and eight classes a year. Over a career, that amounts to somewhere between one hundred and three hundred classes. Skender has nearly doubled this, and he recently told his dean that he intends to teach thirty-five more years. In calendar year 2012 alone, more than two thousand students took Skender’s courses. To accommodate the demand, the university once moved his class to a special oversized room away from the main campus. Even when he teaches early in the morning, his classroom is packed, and many more students wish they could enroll. For one eight
A.M
. class, he had 190 students on the waiting list.

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To be fair, Bowie’s career was hampered by injuries. In college, he missed two full seasons due to shin injuries. Before the draft, to make sure Bowie was completely healthy, Inman subjected him to a seven-hour physical examination. Bowie had a solid first season, but after that, injuries caused him to miss 81 percent of the games in the next four seasons, including nearly two entire seasons. And Inman and his scouts weren’t the only ones to bet on Bowie over Jordan. In June 1984, after the draft, a
Chicago Tribune
headline read “Apologetic Bulls ‘Stuck’ with Jordan.” The general manager of the Bulls, Rod Thorn, seemed disappointed. “We wish he were 7 feet, but he isn’t,” Thorn lamented. “There just wasn’t a center available. What can you do? Jordan isn’t going to turn this franchise around . . . He’s a very good offensive player, but not an overpowering offensive player.” Even Jordan seemed to endorse the Bowie selection: “Bowie fits in better than I would,” he said during his rookie year, as Portland had “an overabundance of big guards and small forwards.” Perhaps the best defense of Inman’s choice was offered by Ray Patterson, who ran the Houston Rockets in 1984, having selected Hakeem Olajuwon first in that draft before Bowie and Jordan: “Anybody who says they’d have taken Jordan over Bowie is whistling in the dark. Jordan just wasn’t that good.”

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Interestingly, Jordan’s basketball coach at the University of North Carolina, the legendary
Dean Smith
, had more of a giver style. Against his own interests, and strong resistance from his assistants, Smith advised Jordan to enter the NBA draft early, before his senior year. Smith had a rule: “We do what’s best for the player out of season and what’s best for the team in season.” As NBA salaries skyrocketed, Smith encouraged every player who had a good shot at being picked in the top five or ten to leave college early and secure his financial future, as long as he promised to come back and finish his education later. In his thirty-six years as head coach, Smith sent nine athletes to the draft early, and seven made good on their promises. Although Smith was encouraging his best players to leave the team, putting his players’ interests first seemed to help him recruit top talent and build trust and loyalty. Smith retired with 879 wins, then more than any coach in NCAA history; his teams made eleven Final Fours and won two national championships. As Chris Granger, executive vice president at the NBA, explains, “
Talented people are attracted to those who care about them
. When you help someone get promoted out of your team, it’s a short-term loss, but it’s a clear long-term gain. It’s easier to attract people, because word gets around that your philosophy is to help people.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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—suggesting 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.