The mere exposure effect has been replicated many times—the more familiar a face, letter, number, sound, flavor, brand, or Chinese character becomes, the more we like it.
Talented people are attracted to those who care about them.
Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same oppo...
Steve Jones, the award-winning former CEO of one of the largest banks in Australia, wanted to know what made financial advisers successful. His team studied key factors such as financial expertise and...
Start the spark of reciprocity by making requests as well as helping others. Help generously and without thought of return; but also ask often for what you need.
Setting high expectations is so important, Skender says. You have to push people, make them stretch and do more than they think possible.
People who prefer to give or match often feel pressured to lean in the taker direction when they perceive a workplace as zero-sum. Whether it’s a company with forced ranking systems, a group of firms...
Originals do vary in their attitudes toward risk. Some are skydiving gamblers; others are penny-pinching germophobes. To become original, you have to try something new, which means accepting some meas...
One of the best things about developing that credibility was if I wanted to try something that was fairly strange, people would be willing to at least give it a shot at the table read, Meyer reflects....
If you want a child to share a toy, instead of asking, Will you share? ask, Will you be a sharer?
By asking people questions about their plans and intentions, we increase the likelihood that they actually act on these plans and intentions.
But there’s a twist: expressing vulnerability is only effective if the audience receives other signals establishing the speaker’s competence.
But as a Puerto Rican woman, she belonged to not one but two minority groups. New research suggests that her double minority status may have amplified the costs and the benefits of speaking up. Manage...
Being a giver is not good for a 100-yard dash, but it’s valuable in a marathon.
Batson figured out a clever way to tease apart whether empathy drives us to help because we want to reduce another person’s distress or our own distress. If the goal is to reduce our own distress, we...
By asking for help, you’re creating an opportunity for them to express their values and feel valued. By asking for a five-minute favor, you impose a relatively small burden—and if you ask a matcher, y...
Above all, I want to demonstrate that success doesn’t have to come at someone else’s expense. In
When takers win, there’s usually someone else who loses. Research shows that people tend to envy successful takers and look for ways to knock them down a notch. In contrast, when givers like David Hor...
When people focus on others, as givers do naturally, they’re less likely to worry about egos and miniscule details; they look at the big picture and prioritize what matters most to others.
We assume that common goals bind groups together, but the reality is that they often drive groups apart. According to Dartmouth psychologist Judith White, a lens for understanding these fractures is t...