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.
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...
Many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks—but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories.
Justifying the default system serves a soothing function. It’s an emotional painkiller: If the world is supposed to be this way, we don’t need to be dissatisfied with it. But acquiescence also robs us...
It seems counterintuitive, but the more altruistic your attitude, the more benefits you will gain from the relationship, writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. If you set out to help others, he explain...
I ask if you’re planning to vote, you don’t feel like I’m trying to influence you. It’s an innocent query, and instead of resisting my influence, you reflect on it.
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. —Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Se...
Even in seemingly independent jobs that rely on raw brainpower, our success depends more on others than we realize.
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.
Being a giver is not good for a 100-yard dash, but it’s valuable in a marathon.
A giver might admit the mistake and move on,
You gotta kiss a lot of frogs, he often told his team, before you find a prince. In fact, frog kissing was one of his mantras: he encouraged his engineers to try out many variations to increase their...
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...
To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself, Einstein lamented.
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. It’s
The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle writes that From a scientific perspective, it was as if the researchers had traced the lineage of the world’s most beautiful swans back to a scruffy flock of barnyard chi...
Sunk costs do have a small effect—decision makers are biased in favor of their previous investments—but three other factors are more powerful. One is anticipated regret: will I be sorry that I didn’t...
Research by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson shows that in the type of psychologically safe environment that Meyer helped create, people learn and innovate more.* And it’s givers who of...