Sincerity Screening: Trusting Most of the People Most of the Time
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