B00AFPTSI0 EBOK (49 page)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.