5: Givers, takers, matchers and fakers

a Revolutionary Approach to Success. It says on your Wikipedia page that even recognized as both the youngest tenured and most highly raded professor at the Wharton School, which is pretty amazing. This is actually the first time we've ever talked to each other, so this is a I feel like it just got real, you know. But it's kind of amazing, Scott, because I feel like every time I read a post that you write, I have one of two reactions. One, this is brilliant. Two, oh my god,

I wish I wrote that. And usually following both of those reactions is if I had thought to write about this topic. You captured my views perfectly. So I feel like either we read a lot of the same stuff, or we share a pretty similar set of values in worldviews. Look, I really think that it's a combination of both, and I think and by the way, I feel that way often when I read a lot of your stuff, I really do think it is that sharing of not just worldviews,

but sharing of similar things. We're both like obviously curious people, and we're curious about a broad array of things and kind of getting at the as truth, getting the truth of the matter as much as possible. But there's these reoccurring themes in my own life I've had over and over and over again, and I actually see a lot of these recurring themes in your life. Maybe we could cycle liniz as each other. Maybe this can be like a moment where we can like try to figure ourselves

out for the first time. It's dangerous, it does. Maybe we shouldn't do that, but I feel like I can. You know, I've noticed some some similar threads that that I'm like, and I'm not even gonna like Shurecote this. I'm literally obsessed with these topics, like it's obsessed. I'm obsessed success, creativity, human potential, talent, nice guys versus like, do nice guys really finished? Last has been a reoccurring theme I've been interested in a long time, and and

and and the intersection of of all those things. So I think that there's maybe, maybe you know, maybe there's maybe we're destined to uh Dare I say be friends? Because you wrote an interesting article about how like everyone says like they're friends with Adam Grant and you're like, that's like kind of annoying to you. All of a sudden, these you know, complete strangers and bare acquaintances are saying, oh, my friend Scott Barry Kaufman, and You're like, who is

this person? And I think it's still easy in the Facebook era to just have a very broad notion of what a friend means. But I still feel like a friend is somebody that you know, sort of knows a lot of embarrassing things about me and vice versa, and that I could call without a scheduled conversation. And I just I think we need another category right to describe, like the person who's between friend and acquaintance, and if

we work with them, we call them colleagues. But if we don't, there's just there's no term in English to describe what these people are. Well, you know, I I I think I'm more liberal about who I call my friends in the sense that if you're my like, you could be my colleague. But if I actually, if I really like you, then I'm fine call like saying you're my friend. Like, I don't feel like you have to pass the criteria where you have to, you know, call me if you're going to jump off a ledge at like,

you know, two in the morning. Like there's this like if I like you, I want to be friends. You know. It's like I have this like urge to be friends with you, you know, but that may make you more extroverted than I am. Okay, well that's an interesting topic again, the introversion thing. We I think we we have a mutual I'm scared to say a friend now colleague slash someone that we both like. May I say Susan Kine, who who wrote this amazing book on introversion, and quite frankly,

I identify as an introvert after reading that book? Where do you put yourself in all that space? Yeah, I think I think I'm probably a sociable introvert. I really love people, but I feel sometimes like it's easy to get over simulated, and I'm most myself when I'm reading or writing or analyzing data, you know, talking to one person, as opposed to sort of being the center of attention

or hanging out in the crowd. Now I realized being a professor and a public speaker is sort of an unusual set of career choices for somebody who's an introvert. But I actually find that, you know, it's a really nice way to sort of share ideas but still have a chance to live the life of the mind. And I've always wondered to other people experience it that way too, So is that also your take? Yeah, you know, I really I still don't fully understand myself. I would be

lying if I said I did. In terms of the intro especially in the introversion extroversion dimension. I find that I if I just go too much in one direction, I really do crave the other thing. And that's and that's just that just seems to be a general role with me, Like I need solitude and I need and I do feel I do That's an interesting way you phrased it. I do feel most myself when I'm like curled up in a bed reading something that I need

to actually curious about. However, with that said, if I let's say that I was like in solitary confinement and I had a full like week where I was like walked up and all, and I was forced for a full week to be feel most myself, you know, I would start hating myself, so I would crave so social. I think that's one of the myths that's probably probably bothered both of us, is like, as introverts, we're still social creatures. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well that's it. I mean,

you just nailed it. Nailed it. Is that nailed it that you know we're I mean, you can still be an introvert to be a social creator. It really is that how much do you need constantly need to you know, I wrote this article and thank you you retweeted me. I was like, awesome, Really it is like the extroversed dimension of the Big five really is this social this need for social attention, this need for uh constant reward. The rewards system, the dove mean system is on high alert.

And you know, I have two cups of coffee and I've become an extrovert. I know, scientifically, you know that doesn't mean I'm an extrovert full stop. It means I've been I've taken artificial drugs that have increased my dove meating system where I all of a sudden like rewards everywhere. I'm like, what's that's going what's going on here? So anyway, let's let's let me let's focus for a second on

your book. Can you just tell people a little bit what the difference is between a giver, a taker, a matcher, and a faker. Actually, that would make a cool song. That would make a really cool song. Now that it's like, it's going to be written the idealer with a better voice, but I know the lyrics will be great if he does it. Yeah. So for me, these are the major styles of interaction that you see in every culture, in

every industry that's ever been studied. And the takers are people who are always trying to get stuff from other people. They don't want to give anything back unless they have to. They're great social loafers, free riders, shirkers. The givers, for me, are the opposite. I think a lot of people when

they hear giver, they imagine a volunteer philanthropist. But for me, it's a much broader idea of just being the kind of person who enjoys helping others and often does it with no strings attached, so that could be sharing your knowledge, being a mentor making introductions, or just showing up earlier

staying late to support other people. And most of us love this idea of being a giver, but we also know they're takers out there, so we tend to reserve giving for our families and our real friends, and then professionally we choose this third style called matching matchers, try token even balance of give and take quid pro quo, I'll do something for you if you do something for me, And the faker is basically usually the taker in disguise masquerading is either a giver or a matcher to then

be able to get things in return, so they're they're macavilion that the fakers are macavilion. Are you really good at Can you tell when Solon's a faker? Really? Can you tell that? Really well? I think that I would like to say that I do better than chance, but how much better than chance is an open question. I think you know. One of the tricky things is we all have moments of giving, taking, and matching your style is really just how you treat most of the people

most of the time. And it's very easily to get thrown off by somebody who's temporarily in a taking mindset because they're dealing with a zero sum situation or scarce resource, or they've been taken advantage of one too many times. And you know, it's one thing to say that person is operating like a taker, it's another to say they are a taker, right, and that's that's their default, their

dominant approach to interacting with people. And I think the latter group is much easier to identify the form than the former. Right, Like, the people who are taking in most of their interactions, you know, tend to leak lots of cues and they're not that great at faking, so

it's much easier to spot them. No, absolutely, there there was this really you know, this New York Times their profile in you, and it was really interesting because I resonated again, maybe that's why we have similar research interests. There's there's other aspects, maybe deeper aspects there are somewhere,

and yeah, I think it's interesting. You know, there's there's this they said that your your need to give sometimes reaches like a compulsion sort of aspect, and I'm like, I physician first of a will totally like tell me and I'll just like cut it. But I do think you're trying to understand this stuff, Like I feel that

myself sometimes. I actually, I mean, I think that, like I'm scared to death of saying I'm a giver now because I'm so like self conscious of like saying any thing that can strategically be used to think that I'm something else, you know, like super self conscious talking to you.

But I think that, like, you know, I think it is fair to say that, Like I almost like I feel a draw like it's very Let's put this way, it's very hard for me, no matter if who it is, what it is, if they request something, it's very hard for me to say no and whatever that makes me whatever. I'm not putting any labels on myself. Can you relate to that at all? Yeah, I think, you know, it's funny. I used to I used to think that that was primarily like from you know, the motivation to be a giver.

And the more time it's been researching this topic and writing about it and talking about it, the more I've become convinced that it's actually like the interplay of two different sets of tendencies. Right. One is values around helping others and wanting to be more of a giver than a taker or a matcher, which usually means you're gonna feel really guilty if you don't help, and you know, you're worry about letting other people down and what kind of you know, ways you could have helped them that

you've you've failed to follow through on. But the other part of it is one of the big fine personality traits that you're well familiar with, agreeableness and personality psychologists used to lump together being agreeable with a giver and they said, like, look, you know, being nice, friendly, welcoming, polite is also usually correlated with being compassionate and helpful and other oriented. And the more data I gather, the more I find that these these characteristics tend to really separate.

And you know, like agreeableness primarily is about being nice and polite, and it makes it really hard to say no. But there are a lot of disagreeable givers out there who on the surface are groff and tough, but tend to have other people as best interests at heart. Bob Sutton at Stanford likes to call them porcupines with a heart of gold. And you know, I think that if, like, if you were one of those people, you wouldn't feel

this compulsion to give right. You'd want to do what's helpful to other people, But a lot of the time that would be saying no or giving them incredibly difficult feedback, and it would be much easier probably to set boundaries.

I'm wondering. I'm surprised you didn't mention euroticism, because I think there's there's an interaction there between euroticism and agreeableness maybe in this situation is that, you know, and and also the big six factor, which I'm going to add we'll call Jewish guilt, which is, you know, that's like the sixth factor of the big of the Big five, which is only you know, only people who speak Yiddish can get access to that factor. But but you know what,

where does Jewish guilt come into being a giver? You don't talk about that in your book at all. I don't you know. I think you could say Jewish guilt or Catholic guilt or both. Yeahtality, I think, yeah, I mean, obviously there are lots of cultures and belief systems known for their emphasis on guilt, and absolutely my read of the evidence is that guilt is one of the most

powerful pro social emotions. You know, it's the sort of, especially when growing up, you know, the constant experierience of having disappointed other people and you know, fall in stored short of some standard or expectation leads to this, at least in Roy Baummeister's terms of you know, it has this like anticipate story effect where then the next time you're potentially going to harm someone or let them down, you worry about feeling guilty again, and that leads you

to take all these actions preventatively to try to do the right thing or to do good, and then that sort of becomes self sustaining, and I think the guilt becomes more and more rare, and you just get in the habit of helping is something that sort of like reinforces almost this this reward system, I mean, this is all these issues are. So when I read, like, when I read your book, I thought of so many different demeans that I'm that I'm trying to think how these

things apply to you. Don't talk too much about the meeting demean but you know, there's this there's this old question like do nice guys finish? Do nice guys finish the last in terms of relationships or in terms of sexual partners or anything like that, And and I think

it is it is a way of reconciling. That is, you do show quite clearly in your book that a lot of you know, some takers can seem at first glance as very popular and attractive, but you do find, you know, eight months in nine months in you start seeing them for who they are and all the shit hits the fans, so to speak, and you see that in terms of success, but that it seems applie to almost anything, right, plies relationships too, right, Yeah, I think

it does. As you know, I was really intrigued by this recent paper of Pat Barclays, where, you know, more or less he found that like, women are more likely to say yes to a first date with a taker, but they're more likely to want a relationship and a marriage with a giver. There you go. And you know, I think almost the dating marriage sort of contrast tracks

beautifully with what we see in the workplace. It's very easy for people to be drawn in by the confidence that takers exude, and we tend to mistake that a lot of times for confidence. But as our I guess

we should say mutual friends. Susan Kane is fond of saying, yeah, there's there's zero correlation between who's the best talker and who has the best ideas, And if you were to translate that into the domain of romantic relationships, I would say, you know, there's there's zero correlation between who's the most

confident date and who's actually the best partner. And you know, I think that most people generally speaking want to marry and and be with a giver, so that that tends to I think, mirror pretty nicely the organizational data, right, So you absolutely can be a good human being, a decent human being, and reach your goals in life. What is the difference atom between a giver and a doormat. I'd like to think that the one sits on your

front porch and the other is a person. But I mean the givers who become doormats, right, the people who say yes to all the people all the time, with all the requests. And I think that what happens with a lot of givers is they just become more thoughtful over time about saying, you know, if somebody has a history or a reputation of being a really selfish taker, then I'm going to be more cautious. Right. It may

mean I help that person less. It could involve, you know, just trying not to be too interdependent with them, or it might mean if you help them, you expect some kind of reciprocity, either they pay it back or pay

it forward, so that you hold them accountable. And the doormats to the people who just allowed takers to, you know, to basically exploit them, they're also I think there were people who just try to help in too many different ways and at too many different times, as opposed to saying, look, i need to be vigilant about helping in ways that align with my interest and expertise so that it's enjoyable and energizing and so that I'm actually contributing something of

unique value to other people and that I've protected time to get my own work done. And I think if you're you know, a little bit more thoughtful as a giver about who you help, how you help, and when you help, it's really it becomes a lot easier to not get taken in and to make sure that you're contributing in ways that are efficient and don't sacrifice your

own priorities. Yeah, I really like that, And I think that it's a message that we're not really taught as children growing up, at least the culture you know, I lived in, there really was this this emphasis that that you know, we're told like be a man whatever that means, right, or like you know, like don't be a sissy, as though being a sissy is like being nice, right, or being giving or being giving. I mean, I do wonder I really really do like your message. And I try

to think of like public policy implications. I'm sure you've given this a lot of thought. What let's just start with school. What what could be some ways we could structure environment so that we reward givers. I mean, we reward high high standardized test scores. We reward that's basically all we reward in an educational context is high standardized test scores. And we don't even reward like things like

you know, and a duckworth. And I just wrote a paper recently we argue that the school should value effort. The value of effort more, you know, value a growth mindset more. But here's something else that your research shows we should probably value givers more. That should be part of something that we explicit or we reward, right, What do you think? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah,

I certainly love that idea. So one way that I've thought about this from time to time is Elliot Aronson's classic Jigsaw classroom, you know, which I love that back in the early nineteen seventies was designed to try to fight prejudice, and you get children coming from different racial and ethnic backgrounds to better respect and understand each other.

And I think the model there though, is a really clever way of valuing giving, because what you do is in an elementary school, you might divide like a grip of four to do a book report on Eleanor Roosevelt's life, and each child is responsible for a different portion of her life, and so they're completely interdependent it. And the way that basically the grade gets allocated to the group is has everybody made the biggest possible contribution towards the

group's goals. I think that is as children's As children get older and we start to see more sort of high stakes testing more forced grading curves. I think we unfortunately end up sort of putting students in situations where they feel like they have to they have to outdo their peers in order to succeed. Right, there's a limited number of spots in you know, a particular college that they want to go to, or there's a limited number of a's in a class, and you know, I think

that that's teaching them the wrong message about life. Most of life is not zero sum. You can succeed in ways that help others. And so I'll tell you I've tried an experiment in my classroom recently on this where I want to encourage students to study together. You know, we don't have a forced grading curve name of any kind, so every student basically gets the grade that he or she earns, but I want to encourage them to help

each other to learn the material. And I'd decided a small way of doing that was I have some really difficult multiple choice questions on my undergraduate final exam, so they can pick the one question they think is hardest that they don't know the answer to and right now in the name of someone else in the class they think knows it. And if that person gets it right,

they get that person's points too. And it was really fun when I experimented with this year ago to see a bunch of students in class come together and basically like figure out who knows what and each become experts in different domains. That's a test of like metacognition in a way. No, no meta other meta cognition. Yeah, maybe maybe transactive memory too, you know, like memory of who

knows what? But I think it also it really rewarded students who not only had certain knowledge, but were willing to share it and sort of make it known to other people that, you know, this was an area that they had studied really hard or that they had taken a deep interest in and they were sort of in a position to let others benefit from that. And I would love to see more mechanisms encourage that kind of

giving and reward it. You talked about zero sum. You talked to the book a little bit about how credit is not a zero sum game giving or taking credit and takers do view it as a zero sum game. Is that right? I think more often than not, I think a lot of takers do look at credit as a zero sum game. Right. The more I want to win, the more you have to lose. And I had, I guess, an experience with this when I was in grad school.

I was working on my first major paper. I'd finished the equivalent of a master's thesis, and I had a bunch of undergrads who helped me with it. They were, you know, great in helping to formulate the ideas and you can collect some of the data. And I turned in the first draft of the paper to one of my advisors, and you know, it basically had my name and five undergraduate students names on it, and I was

told to take them off. And you know, the thought was, well, you know, undergraduates are just research assistants, and you know we may credit them and the acknowledgments, but we don't make them co authors of our papers. And also, you know that may detract from you know, your identity as an independent scholar. And I said, I said, first of all, these students absolutely earned authorship. Second of all, you know, there's no way in which having them on the paper

detracts from my contribution. Right, It's I'm still the lead on the paper, right, I'm the first author. And I don't I don't think it takes anything away from me to bring them on as authors two through you know six, and I basically, probably against my better judgment, ignored my advisor's suggestion and ended up publishing the paper that way.

And it's it's one of the decisions I feel the best about looking back, because one of those students ended up going to a PhD program and is now a professor. It's really nice to have a you know, like an influential paper to start grad school with, you know, and several others. You know, it's become sort of interesting conversation pieces as they've interviewed it for jobs, and it's a great opportunity to you know, to get there their ideas

out there a little bit too. So I think that we should all probably stop and think when we ask, you know, if I give somebody else credit, is that going to steal the spotlight me? And try to figure out ways that everybody can shine. Yeah, And I really like that. And we can really learn from people's mistakes as well. You read very eloquently about a lot of

specific examples. What was Jonah's Jonah Salk's big mistake? You know, this is funny because I was looking for interesting examples of givers who had shared credit generously, And I started reading about Jonah Selk, thinking of, you know, the guy who created the polio vaccine. I remembered reading some time ago that you know, he was interviewed by a journalist and asked was he going to patented and he basically said, you know, you wouldn't patent the sun. This is for

the benefit of humanity. Right as I read more deeply, I found out a few things. One, it was not possible to patent the polio vaccine. I didn't meet the patent criteria. Two, it turned out that Sulk, at least in the credit domain, was pretty massive taker. So he, you know, created this vaccine, building directly off of the Nobel Prize winning work of three scientists that had happened a few years earlier. And then he had a whole team of people in his lab that were absolutely essential

to getting the vaccine created. And when he gave his his major award and announcements speech, he never even acknowledged the names of the people who had you know, helped him and made the polio vaccine possible. And then he spent more or less the next few decades of his life just ignoring them and never gave them public credit, and he got, you know, shunned by a whole Academy of Sciences. He never really got the scientific recognition he

felt he deserved. And you know, there's some debate about whether that's because in part, you know, his contribution was really applied and the basic science had already been done. But it seems that some of that was because, you know, he violated the scientific norms of sort of honoring all

the people who made fundamental contributions to his work. And I think it's very telling that his son, who's a physician, ended up finally at an anniversary after his death of the polio vaccine, ended up acknowledging finally the contributions to the people who had helped good for it go him the song. Yeah, I feel like he set the record straight in some ways, maybe too little, too late, but

he definitely did the right thing. And then you look at I think it's very equally as telling our other opposite ends of that spectrum, like people like George is it mayor or Meyer, George Meyer Meyer that you talk about that many people don't automatically associate with the Simpsons. Yet he's he does. I don't know, you could say

he deserves more more credits than he's taken. Yeah, I think, you know, George Meyer's It was such an interesting example for me because you don't expect to see that many

givers in Hollywood. And actually, my editor, Kevin Dalton, had had been in comedy before he joined the publishing industry, and as we were working through a chapter, he said, you know, this reminded me a lot of George Meyer, this great Simpsons writer that everybody says it's the funniest person in comedy, and you know, almost nobody's ever heard of him. You know, you might be somebody to profile,

so you know, we've we started reading them. Kevin helped get me introduced to him, and it turned out that, you know, although he'd contributed over three hundred Simpsons episodes and many described him as the funniest person in the heart of the show, he'd only ever gotten writing credit on twelve of the episodes. What happened was, at some point he realized the best thing for everyone, himself included, was for the show to be as good as possible.

And you know what he was able to do, probably the most effectively, was you know, give people feedback, make their scripts better, and you know, not necessarily worry about who got the credit at the end of the day.

And the sort of the I think the nice upshot of that was even after he left the show, everybody wanted him back and they talked him into returning, and then when they made the big movie, he was one of the people that everybody wanted to have around, which really good back to our opening conversation that you know, George is so funny that it would be very easy for everyone else to be jealous of him and threatened

by him. But you know, he's a guy who made everybody else funnier, and so you want him in the room, right because he's using his talents for the best interests of the group, and he's somebody who makes you more successful, and so instead of gunning for him, you end up rooting for him absolutely. You know, I've spent enough in my whole life, I've spent a good amount of deal of time around jerks. I would say, starting why starting

do you say why? Yeah? Okay, well, I can say starting from my youth, I don't want to like turn this conversation to me. All of a sudden but I was bullied a lot, let's just you know, just say because of my I was in special education, so I was bullied all the time and spending around a lot of time around these people. I'm fascinated by them because I want to know something in particular that fascinates me. So many of them seem to lack fundamental insight self

insight into their actions on others. And that's one one thing I noticed so much that it wouldn't even like, for instance, with Sulk, it seems like it didn't even dawn on him, that it could even dawn on It wouldn't even dawn on me. To not even have that not dawn on me, to acknowledge other people that have helped me. Do you know it's probably same with you, But but around like authentic, authentic you know, like people

who are just ruthless. They don't even seem to be aware or or or is it that they don't care that I don't understand. I don't know if it's there they are aware and don't care, or they just don't they're not aware. But I'm very interested in what in getting the truth of that? What are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean I think that that you definitely see both varieties.

You know, like Sulk at some point could not plead ignorance because he had been directly confronted by several of these colleagues and he more or less blew them off, and it became fairly apparent that, you know, either he didn't care or he didn't care enough. I think that, you know, it's interesting when you when you look at this sort of through the lens of give and take, there are a lot of takers who think that they're

givers and that I find deeply disturbing too too. You know, a lot of takers are narcissistic, and they tend to have sort of inflated egos, and that may extend to you know, how they judge themselves even than the domain of concern for others. But I think there is an information discrepancy problem that you know, you just there's there's some research on this dating back in the nineteen seventies that you just know more about your own contributions than

you do other people's. Right, you, like Scott, you have access to every act of giving you have ever done. When you're judging somebody else, you only have a small fraction of their moments of generosity, and so I think it is easy to overestimate how much of that we do.

And one of the easiest ways to you know, get the takers to be less selfish or more self aware, you know, to also take the jerks and get them to realize their impact on others is to try to help them better sort of calibrate, you know, how much damage are they caused into others and how much good are they doing relative to other people they may interact with. And I think it's hard to get that feedback well, absolutely, So this is a good time to ask practical what

are some signs that you're a taker? Like, because I think, like you know, that's helpful for people to, like you said, it's you're never always a giver, always a taker. I mean, there are obviously times where I'm being a taker at times of year being a taker because we're not perfect human beings. But I think there's a great value in knowing some signs so that we can be more self aware. I think we could all use to be more self aware, probably of when we think we may be giving but

we're actually taking. For instance, do you have any specific signs you can talk about sure, you know, I have to say I read a tongue in chek post about this some months ago about the top ten signs that you might be a taker, and some of them I'd actually gathered like a whole list of funny comments from readers over the previous year, and I had a whole list of my own, and so I think some of some of my favorite ones where when a child draws a picture of you it bears a passing resemblance to

either a snake or a weasel. Oh, I think that's a good test. You know, you're in your thirties, you're still bragging about your SAT score. That's a problem. I could check that one off my list because I didn't do well my SATs. Yeah. My favorite one was that after reading The Giving Tree, you feel like the tree got exactly what it deserved. No, but I mean I think, look, I think you know the signs that that you might

be a taker? You know, one would just be that that you find that that people have a hard time trusting you. That's that's sort of a telltale signal that something's up. A second is that you feel like other people never fully value your contributions and you're constantly going around underappreciated. Another interesting sign is sort of this feedback that you might occasionally pick up that people think you carry around a sense of entitlement. So can I stop

it right there? Because anythink you've just mentioned I don't know if you read an article I wrote on covert narcissism a couple of years ago. So everything you just mentioned as part of the questionnaire for covert narcissism, maybe covert narcissists are fakers. I think a lot of them are, you know. I think there are some covert narcissists who are You might call them benevolent narcissists, yeah, you know, and like the way that they sort of build themselves

up is to be the most helpful person. I got an email from somebody last year who I guess had read my book and said, my goal is to become the greatest giver? How do I do that? Wow? And my first response was, abandon that goal. It's not about being the greatest giver. It's about being more of a giver or or you know, trying to express these values that person wants to win. They say, they say giving is a competition. Yeah, I am going to one up

you and become even more helpful and generous than you are. Right, But I think that you're right. Most most covert narcissists probably are fakers. Cool. So I didn't mean to cut you off. You can keep going, but I wanted to capture that moment. No, I mean, I think you know, the other signs are not surprising, right, So, spending a massive amount of time sort of carefully crafting your image to put your best foot forward, you know, going out of your way to document all the important people that

you are photographed with. Randomly Uh yeah, I think I think a lot of the signs of insecurity often sort of predict taking behavior pretty regularly. Right. So, so taking, I want to be very clear. Taking it can be a trait, and you often talk about it as a trait, but it also is a state, and it's something that I think there's value for all of us, no matter

who we are, to recognize these things in ourselves. You know, like if we see ourselves posting too many pictures on Facebook of ourselves with others, that it doesn't mean like we're immediately a horrible, horrible person, but it might be information for us that, you know what, maybe I am

going feeling particularly insecure these days. You know, it's it's like a you know, like we all go through those moments, you know, where we're like, but it could be maybe there could be information there that you've been in this state for too long? Right, Does that make sense? Yeah, I think that would be fascinating. And you know, it makes me think that this would be a really interesting

sort of built in feedback mechanism for social media. Oh. Absolutely, your post could be analyzed for exactly that kind of information.

And yeah, I think it's it's the kind of thing that in real life you get from your close friends occasionally, right, Like, I think a lot of people have gone through the experience of having a friend say, you know, like this is this is too much about you, or I feel like, you know, relationship is out of balance, and I think a lot of people actually overcorrect for that and they decide, you know, I want to be on the giving end of every exchange and never want to be a taker.

And I think that you know, that that often stops them from asking for help or for you know, from reaching out when they really need it. And I think there's a huge difference between taking and receiving. You know you can you can be a taker, which is basically using somebody else solely for personal gain. And I obviously don't have a lot of patience or respect for that.

But you know, receiving is to me just saying, look, there's there's somebody who can benefit me more than it costs them, and I will accept that contribution and then try to maintain a willingness to pay it back or pay it forward. And I think we probably all need to become be better at receiving and do less taking. I would I would completely agree. So a lot of this message is there. Are you argue that our success depends more on others than we realize, and that repute

things like reputation matters. You know that a lot of a lot of jerks. It really does come back to you in a karma sort of karma sort of way. So I want to ask, because you wrote an interesting article relevant to this reputation idea, I want to ask you who do you think will leave a greater legacy, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. I actually I picked up

on this from an interview that Malcolm Gladwell did. He said that if he were going to bet in fifty years, Apple will still be around and Microsoft won't, but Steve Jobs would be forgotten and Bill Gates would be remembered. And I found that to be a really interesting juxtaposition. And you know, I remember, you know, Malcolm saying basically that he thought that legacies were about helping others and giving primarily right, They're not about what you achieved, They're

about how your achievements contribute to the world. And you know, I think that that unfortunately, a lot of Jobs is technological and design achievements are going to be you know, we're going to evolve past them, where as the Gates legacy is one of you know, essentially potentially solving problems of access to information, poverty, health disparities. And I think that that probably in the long run, is more memorable and and something that that general sort of members in

society find to be more meaningful. So I some going to vote with Malcolm and say, I think Gates will be more remembered than Jobs. Oh wow, So fifty years from now we'll be holding our iPad fifty and will be will be daydreaming of Bill Gates. It's entirely possible. This is what you're saying, that's really interesting. Now you've you've wrote a article, by the way, about Malcolm Gladwell. I saw an interview did with him. I think it was at Penn. He came over and that was really

an interesting interview. And you wrote an article defending him because a lot of my scientist colleagues are very angry with him and think that he keep fundamentally misrepresents science. And I imagine and yet and you defended him, and I thought that was really interesting, and I I try, I try to keep an open mind about all this stuff, and I'd love to hear some of what your thoughts

on the value of that kind of science writing. Well, I think, you know, I think the thing that that Malcolm has done for the world is he's made social science cool. And you know, I think I think social science is one of the most useful things that exists in the world, and a lot of it just sits in academic journalis to collecting dust. And he's made it not only acceptable but interesting to talk about. He's made it important for organizations to care about and really understand.

And you know, he's opened the door for all of us who write these kinds of books and blog posts and articles to have a genre to contribute to. It's about big ideas and sort of the synthesis of compelling stories and important studies. I have never ever read a book that's by a scientist that does not include some biases. I think it's impossible to go in with a blank slate.

And you know, I think that that people who accuse Malcolm Gladwell of cherry picking, we all cherry pick, right, We're The job of an author is to make an argument and challenge people's assumptions, not to represent, you know, the whole and unadulterated truth, in my opinion, and I think that, you know, you have to oversimplify, you have to miss out on important nuances if you're going to translate something that's fairly complex for experts in a domain

to debate for you know, sort of a broad audience of readers with lots of different perspectives and different kinds of knowledge available. And you know, I think there's there's there are a lot of sour grapes out there about you know, people wanting to put Malcolm Gladwell out of business, and it should be the real scientists writing science books.

But you know, without without really brilliant storytellers who love science, like Malcolm playing the translation role, we don't exist as public intellectuals or thought leaders or anything else that our colleagues aspire to be. So I agree with a lot of that, and I don't, you know, we don't need to get a great, great discussion over this, but I

agree with a lot of that. But I don't know if I would go so far to say that without him in particular, there's there's like no one could fulfill that role in in a in a in a in a more nuanced way and a more holistic, taking different perspectives way that does the job equally as well. That I don't know, But so I don't know if I would go so far as agree with that specific statement

that we that the whole field needs specifically him. But I think that I think there's a lot of value in what you're saying, and I agree with an awful lot of it, and I i am I do feel a great sense of like indebtedness to him for for paving the way on that. So you wrote an article on called emotional intelligence is overrated, and this is another topic of mutual interest of ours. I have to say that I was surprised about that article because it almost

seems contradictory to your whole mission. So you know, it's all about you. We talked about cherry picking, right, and it's all about framing. So in that article, you frame it as sort of like, you know, look, it matters what dependent measure we're talking about. But I looked at this dependent measure and i Q was the best predictor.

But then you titled the thing emotional intelligence overrated. Now, so if I was thinking, like if I was Adam Grant and I'm staying consistent to all my values and everything I wrote in my book, I would have titled it that that being a giver is underrated in XYZ context? Do you see what I'm saying? So I was confused, even though I agree, I know the findings are really really interesting and that i Q in certain contexts where you don't need to manage interpersonal relationships, i Q is

the better predictor. But it seems like your broader point wouldn't be the kind of person that would that would try to like say something like, oh, well, like niceness is overrated, you know, like you of old people. So anyway, I want I've been dying to ask you that question. Yeah, letting me ask you that. By the way, it's it's interesting. I think, first of all, I think that that social science really thrives on debate, right, Controversy moves us forward.

And I think that every once in a while, when I see cult like devotion to a topic where the amount of let's say, fervor for it far exceeds what the actual evidence says, I feel like I have a responsibility as a social scientist to say, let's take a step back, let's look at what available data are and make sure that we're spending our time and our money in organizations right, whether we're doing emotional intelligence training or

doing hiring on it effectively and wisely. And you know, it's I think that there are a lot of misconceptions out there about what emotional intelligence is. And this is actually why I think a lot of a lot of

readers misinterpreted the article to begin with. You know, I laid out I think there's widespread consensus among you know, all the psychologists who study this topic, from you know, Peter Salave who's now the president of Yale, to many of the other scholars in the domain that emotional intelligences originally defined and studied is about the skills you have in recognizing emotions, knowing what causes them, and managing them. And you know, it's not being nice, it's not social skills,

it's not self awareness, it's not empathy. It's a much narrower set of abilities that depend on basically knowledge and strategies for applying emotion to everyday life. And it turns out that at least if you measure job performance, it's not nearly as important as most people think it is. And I feel like that's a conversation that needs to be had because I would rather see people, frankly, invest in how do I get better at helping other people?

Then how do I get better at reading other people's emotions. I would rather see them, you know, focus their time and energy on how do I learn about my employee's goals and what they want. If you're a manager, you know how they want to develop and what skills they want to learn. Then how do I figure out what made my employee angry today? Right? And I think that the sort of I think we've overcorrected, right. We used

to have sort of an IQ heavy bias. We were too cognitive, and I think that now actually emotional intelligence gets way over emphasized relative to the degree that these other factors matter. Look, this is something I like about you. So you're the kind of person that you want to be. You want to have integrity and you don't want to You're the type of person that if the if the pendulum swang too much in the direction of your ideas, that you would want to rebel against that. You're absolutely right.

In fact, I want to rend. I want to write the next book about it's going to be called Take and Take Why Selfish bat succeed. So, so that's funny you said that because I feel the same way. I wrote this book called on Gifted, where I talk about, you know, why we've overvalued IQ as the best indicator of human potential. Yet I've seen this big fad everywhere where,

for every marketing. It's a marketing ploy where everything you want you want to sell you have to say, is your subtitle why it's better than i Q. Daniel Goldman's book sold so many copies because there's a subtitle said, why emotional intelligence bend in i Q? I actually do personally, I feel this I want to rebel too. I actually am thinking about writing a book on why i Q matters. Wow, people would be like why, Like, what what happened to your entire ideology? Because I think the truth is always

is everything, you know. The truth is that i Q matters. The truth is an emotional The truth is that it matters, you know. The only truth is probably that we shouldn't we shouldn't put anything on such a pedestal that we we ignore everything else. Maybe that's the only truth. I wholeheartedly agree with that, and I think that actually that impulse to rebel against your own ideas, I feel like

that's what separates this scholars from the fundamentalists. Yeah, I agree, Yeah, I remember Gary Marx is this great sociologist as far as I know, no relation to Karl Marx. But Gary Marx once wrote that the difference between a scholar and a fundamentalist is that a scholar asked questions and a

fundamentalist gives answers. Oh that's exactly right. I mean, like, to me, that sums up what we're supposed to be doing as social scientists, and it also suggests that we should be updating our beliefs every time right, like that was wrong. Maybe givers aren't as successful as I thought they were, and I had a bunch of data and that told a good story. I don't think that's true at the moment, but it could be true, and if it were, I would, you know, update my perspective. And

I feel like that doesn't happen enough. No, I agree, it doesn't. I want to end this interview with some sort of practical fakeaway for listeners who are givers but they don't they're tired. You talk in the book about being an exhaust being, getting exhausted being a giver and needing to protect that something I can completely relate to. It's, you know, compassion fatigue. I think some some in the helping professions they call it. Are there some practical advices

things ways to say no? Now you've framed it as ways to say no without hurting your image, but also I would say, like ways of saying no and still being a good, decent human being. Yeah, I think that. You know, I used to have a much harder time saying no. And as you know, when you start to get a larger and larger number of requests, you start to have a choice. At some point what I've come to realize is that saying no freeze you up to

say yes when it matters most. And you know, each each time I get an opportunity, you know, I try to look at that and say, okay, is this going to compromise my ability to help the people who I care most about or who need it the most, And where I can, you know, contribute in the most unique ways. And I think that that makes it a lot easier to say instead of no, right like, here, here are my major priorities and the ways that I like to contribute.

If I can help you in one of these ways, you know, let let's talk so that The biggest takeaway for me from the interviews I did was the idea of a five minute favor from the serial entrepreneur Adam Rifkin, who said, what you want to do basically is find you know more or less small ways of adding large

value to other people's lives. And what I think is brilliant about this idea is that if you are a giver already and you're exhausted or overextended, if you can try to reduce the cost of your giving, right, think about instead of you know, spending an hour with every person who reaches out to you. Are there other people who have the same expertise that you've helped in the past.

Can you make the introduction there and you know, maybe connect them or you know, in a lot of cases, I've worked with entrepreneurs who are like constantly asked, how do I start a business? How do I think about finding a co founder? How do I know raise funds? And you have a bunch of those one on one conversations, Well why not have a Google hangout once a week where you bring all those people together and you answer all their questions at once, and you've begunn to a

support network where they can help each other. You know, that's like a scaled up five minute favor. But I think we all need to think about managing the costs of our giving and doing it more efficient ways. But what I also love about the five minute favor is that if you are a taker matcher, this is the easiest way to get started with helping others. Right to say, you don't have to become Mother Teresa or Gandhi, you

don't have to do Herculian acts of sacrifice. Just look for you know, these little ways that you can make other people's lives a tiny bit better, you know, whether that's recognizing other people who do a great job by writing a thank you note to their boss, whether that's making an introduction or going out of your way to give a tiny little bit of feedback. I think that, you know, oftentimes we can add more value in five minutes than we think. I love it. What a great

way in this interview. Thank you so much for chatting me with Adam in for being so generous with your time. No, thank you, Scott, pleasure to chat. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as formulive A thoughtwer looking you, lind If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, do you go to Psychology podcast dot com