Generous Tit for Tat: The Adaptable Giver
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.
The dating couples—especially the ones in love—operated like selfless givers. Their default
approach was to empathize with their partners’ needs and give in right away, regardless of their own
interests. Concern for their partners had the effect of “short-circuiting efforts to discover integrative
solutions in favor of more accessible but less mutually satisfactory outcomes,” the researchers write,
leading to a “‘kid gloves’ approach to problem solving.” When researchers studied selfless givers at