Give and Take: WHY HELPING OTHERS DRIVES OUR SUCCESS

encourage matchers and takers to act like givers. To figure out how Freecycle works, Willer’s team
studied random samples of members at both Craigslist and Freecycle. They collected surveys from
more than a thousand members of the two exchange organizations from dozens of communities around
the United States, measuring reciprocity styles by asking members to answer a series of questions
about whether they generally preferred to maximize their own gains or contribute to others. The
givers had donated an average of twenty-one items on Freecycle. The takers could have given
nothing, but they had given away an average of more than nine items each on Freecycle.
Interestingly, in fact, people often join Freecycle to take, not give. “People usually hear about
Freecycle as a way to get free stuff. Your average person will join thinking, ‘I can get something for
nothing,’” Beal says. “But a paradigm shift kicks in. We had a big wave of new parents who needed
help in hard times. They received strollers, car seats, cribs, and high chairs. Later, instead of selling
them on Craigslist, they started giving them away.”
What drives people to join a group with the intention of taking, but then end up giving?
The answer to this question opens up another way that givers avoid the bottom of the success
ladder. When dealing with individuals, it’s sensible for givers to protect themselves by engaging in
sincerity screening and acting primarily like matchers in exchanges with takers. But in group settings,
there’s a different way for givers to make sure that they’re not being exploited: get everyone in the
group to act more like givers. The strategy was foreshadowed by Jason Geller and Lillian Bauer, who
directly asked their mentees to pay it forward in mentoring groups of more junior colleagues. Earlier,
Adam Rifkin, the Silicon Valley giver who was named Fortune’s best networker, did the same thing
in his entire network. He invited the people who benefited from his giving to help other people in his
web of relationships, and a giving norm evolved. As I noted in the opening chapter, people rarely
have a single reciprocity style that they apply uniformly to every domain of their lives. If a group
develops a norm of giving, members will uphold the norm and give, even if they’re more inclined to
be takers or matchers elsewhere. This reduces the risks of giving: when everyone contributes, the pie
is larger, and givers are no longer stuck contributing far more than they get.
What is it about groups that can tilt members in the giver direction? At the end of this chapter, I’ll
introduce you to a powerful activity that some of the world’s leading companies and business schools
have started using to motivate giving among takers and matchers, as well as givers. But first, by
unpacking Freecycle’s success in motivating matchers and takers to give, we can gain a deeper
understanding of what individuals and organizations can do to foster greater levels of giving. The
starting point is to ask why people give in the first place.