Give and Take: WHY HELPING OTHERS DRIVES OUR SUCCESS

In a study by researchers Frank Flynn and Vanessa Bohns, people learned that they would be
approaching strangers in New York City and asking them to a fill out a survey. The participants
estimated that only one out of every four people would say yes. In reality, when the participants went
out and asked, one out of every two said yes. In another study in New York City, when participants
approached strangers and asked them to borrow a cell phone, they expected 30 percent to say yes, but
48 percent did. When people approached strangers, said they were lost and asked to be walked to a
nearby gym, they expected 14 percent to do it, but 43 percent did. And when people needed to raise
thousands of dollars for charity, they expected that they would need to solicit donations from an
average of 210 people to meet their fund-raising goals, anticipating an average donation under $50.
They actually hit their goals after approaching half as many people—on average, it only required 122
people, whose donations were over $60 each.
Why do we underestimate the number of people who are willing to give? According to Flynn and
Bohns, when we try to predict others’ reactions, we focus on the costs of saying yes, overlooking the
costs of saying no. It’s uncomfortable, guilt-provoking, and embarrassing to turn down a small request
for help. And psychological research points to another factor—equally powerful, and deeply rooted
in American culture—that causes people to believe there aren’t many givers around them.
Workplaces and schools are often designed to be zero-sum environments, with forced rankings
and required grading curves that pit group members against one another in win-lose contests. In these
settings, it’s only natural to assume that peers will lean in the taker direction, so people hold back on
giving. This reduces the actual amount of giving that occurs, leading people to underestimate the
number of people who are interested in giving. Over time, because giving appears to be uncommon,
people with giver values begin to feel that they’re in the minority.
As a result, even when they do engage in giving behaviors, people worry that they’ll isolate
themselves socially if they violate the norm, so they disguise their giving behind purely self-interested
motives. As early as 1835, after visiting the United States from France, the social philosopher Alexis
de Tocqueville wrote that Americans “enjoy explaining almost every act of their lives on the
principle of self-interest.” He saw Americans “help one another” and “freely give part of their time
and wealth for the good of the state,” but was struck by the fact that “Americans are hardly prepared
to admit” that these acts were driven by a genuine desire to help others. “I think that in this way they
often do themselves less than justice,” he wrote. A century and a half later, the Princeton sociologist
Robert Wuthnow interviewed a wide range of Americans who chose helping professions, from
cardiologists to rescue workers. When he asked them to explain why they did good deeds, they
referenced self-interested reasons, such as “I liked the people I was working with” or “It gets me out
of the house.” They didn’t want to admit that they were genuinely helpful, kind, generous, caring, or
compassionate. “We have social norms against sounding too charitable,” Wuthnow writes, such that
“we call people who go around acting too charitable ‘bleeding hearts,’ ‘do-gooders.’”
In my experience, this is what happens in many businesses and universities: plenty of people hold
giver values, but suppress or disguise them under the mistaken assumption that their peers don’t share
these values. As the psychologists David Krech and Richard Crutchfield explained many years ago,
this creates a situation where “no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes.” Consider
a 2011 survey of Harvard freshmen: they consistently reported that compassion was one of their top
values, but near the bottom of Harvard’s values. If many people personally believe in giving, but
assume that others don’t, the whole norm in a group or a company can shift away from giving. “Ideas