Business

Be a little bit nice

By Nicholas Epley     
September 2, 2015

From: Magazine

Photo by Getty.

This is an edited version of the speech given by Chicago Booth’s Nicholas Epley, John Templeton Keller Professor Behavioral Science, at Booth’s Convocation ceremony on June 13.

Mark Twain is often credited with recommending that you should eat a live frog for breakfast every day just so you’d always know the worst part of your day was behind you. This is obviously the same logic that puts faculty speakers at the beginning of a commencement ceremony like this one. I mention this because I’m a psychologist and know the importance of managing people’s expectations, and so I’m deeply honored that today’s graduates have asked me to speak, on the hope that I’ll be better than a frog
for breakfast.

I haven’t always been confident that I’ll exceed that standard. Preparing to give this talk has been unusually hard because faculty commencement speakers at the University of Chicago are asked not just to sound wise, be inspirational, and get out of the way quickly like other commencement speakers, but also to talk about actual data and substantive research. Being part of this family at UChicago means that you can no longer wax poetic; you have to wax statistics. That’s what I plan to do. Just remember, you’re comparing me to a frog for breakfast.

As I said, I’m a psychologist, but just to clarify for the parents who haven’t been in my class or lab, I’m not that kind of psychologist. I do not have a couch in my office where your children have been coming to tell me all of their problems for the last couple of years. Instead, I’m a psychologist who works as a behavioral scientist, studying human beings in the same way a chemist studies chemicals or a physicist studies particles: we put people in experiments, randomly assign them to one of several conditions, and measure the outcomes so that we can distinguish causes from effects.

Can my field of behavioral science give any good sense to today’s graduates about how to act in the rest of your life in order to live a good life? I think it can, and I want to tell you about one relatively modest, but hopefully memorable, pair of findings that I think will help you with your life ahead. Because your life ahead is going to be a little different than the life behind you.

You have now succeeded in obtaining an advanced graduate degree from one of the most celebrated universities in the world. This is a great achievement. But now the rules for success will change. As a student, your success was individualistic, based on you and how you performed in school, alone, compared to everyone else sitting next to you right now.

But success outside the classroom is not just individualistic; it’s collective. How well you do at work, and in life more generally, depends hugely on how well you can get along with others rather than on what you can do on your own. No leader does anything meaningful in an organization alone. Like all great truths, this is not a new insight. Charles M. Schwab, founder of Bethlehem Steel and one of the great industrialists of the early 20th century, said, “I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people [to be] the greatest asset I possess.” A leader who can’t inspire others is not a leader for long. An employee who can’t get along with colleagues never rises through the ranks. And an MBA or a PhD who can’t work well with others can never get the help needed to turn great ideas into reality.

And so this raises one of the central challenges of your life. How do you get along with other people while also pursuing your own goals? How do you get other people excited about helping turn your ideas into something bigger than you could ever manage on your own? How do you do all of this while maintaining a solid marriage, good family relations, and strong friendships that keep you happy and healthy? Your individual skills have earned you a great degree from the University of Chicago, but it’s your social skills, your ability to get along with everyone around you, that are going to earn you a great life from here on out.

Now it’s obvious on just a moment’s reflection that the best way to get along with other people is to be nice to them. Fine. Getting that kind of advice from a psychologist like me is not better than being served a frog for breakfast. It’s a little like hearing your doctor tell you that you need to exercise more in order to be healthy. That’s not helpful advice because your doctor hasn’t told you how much you have to exercise in order to be healthy. Is walking a little bit a day fine? Can I just take the stairs instead of the elevator? Or should I quit my job and start running, Forrest Gump style?

All of life requires some balance, and what you’re looking for is the optimal point on the efficiency curve. Exercising too little is bad for your health and happiness, but exercising too much is a waste of time without benefiting your health. The same is true in your social relations. Being nasty to others means you get only nastiness in return. Nobody will work with you. But a person at work who is always helping other people can become a doormat for the whole organization. A person who trusts everyone equally is eventually taken unfair advantage of. A person who only has kind words for others never calls out others’ mistakes, or stands up for deeply held values. How should you calibrate your values? What’s the optimal degree of niceness?

This is where behavioral science could, I think, offer some help. Consider a series of experiments I conducted with Nadav Klein, who in just a moment will be coming up here to get his PhD. In these experiments, Nadav and I were interested in the kind of reputations people earn from their behavior toward others. We all know that we love selfless people in this world, like Mother Teresa, and we hate purely selfish people, like Bernie Madoff. But what does the line of people’s impressions look like between these two extremes? Is it straight, such that the more selfless you are, the more favorable a reputation you earn in the eyes of others?

To find out, we asked a group of people in an experiment to report their impressions of another person we called Bob. Bob had just done something relatively selfish or relatively selfless. In particular, Bob was participating in an experiment of ours with another person, and we randomly gave Bob $6 and told him to decide how he should divide it between himself and the other participant in the experiment. Bob could give the other person anywhere from nothing ($0), being completely selfish, to everything ($6), being completely selfless, and every dollar increment in between. We randomly assigned people in this experiment to learn that Bob gave just one of these outcomes: you learned that Bob gave nothing and kept everything for himself, gave $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, or gave away all $6, keeping nothing for himself. We then asked people to report their impressions of Bob in a series of survey questions.

Nadav and I found something completely obvious, and something not so obvious. The obvious part is that people had a more negative impression of Bob as he became increasingly selfish. That is, impressions became more negative as Bob went from giving $3, to $2, to $1, to nothing, where Bob really seemed to be a jerk. The not-so-obvious part is that people’s impressions did not become meaningfully more positive as Bob became increasingly selfless. That is, people did not form a markedly more positive impression as Bob gave increasingly more than half to the other person, going from $4 to $5 to $6. When Bob gave everything to the other person, he was not judged any more positively than when he just split the money in half. Being completely selfish and giving nothing to others was judged harshly, but being really nice and giving away everything was not judged more favorably than being just a little nice and dividing the amount fairly.

We have replicated these results in many other different kinds of experimental procedures, and have even replicated the result of this particular experiment in six other countries around the world. I think this body of research suggests an important, and encouraging, point. Other people do not need you to be Mother Teresa in order to admire and respect you. They just need you to be the kind of person who values treating other people decently. Being just a little bit nice seems to go a very long way.

Behavioral science suggests that being a little bit nice to others is not just a key ingredient for working well with others; it also seems to be a key ingredient for achieving another one of your major goals in life: being happy. That is, in one research finding after another, being just a little bit nice to others—being decent, kind, generous, and generally prosocial—produces surprisingly big gains to people’s happiness, well-being, and even their health.

To see just one example of these surprising gains, consider a series of experiments that I worked on with another one of today’s graduates, Juliana Schroeder, who will soon be getting her PhD up here alongside Nadav. Juliana and I were interested in understanding an all-too-common experience in which people do not seem to be particularly nice to each other: engaging with strangers. Every morning, for example, I take the train into my office. And there on the train, every morning, I see delightful people sitting right next to each other, failing to even acknowledge each other as human beings. People sit down, put on their headphones, and do not even look at or glance to the person sitting right next to them. Not a smile, not a hello, not a quick, “How are you doing?” What if we were a little bit nicer to a stranger? What if, instead of ignoring other perfectly decent people, we were friendly and tried to learn a little something about the person sitting next to us?

Well, I can tell you that people on the trains thought this was a terrible idea. When we asked train riders in one experiment to predict how happy and pleasant their commute would be, they predicted they would be less happy if they tried to talk to the person sitting next to them than if they just sat in solitude and ignored that person. These predictions, however, were precisely wrong. That is, when we actually asked people, by randomly assigning them to conditions in an experiment, to talk to the person sitting next to them and try to make a connection, they were actually significantly happier than those we instructed to sit in solitude. Being nice to a stranger was surprisingly pleasant. We’ve replicated this in buses, cabs, and waiting rooms as well. Aristotle famously said that “man is by nature a social animal,” but we don’t always act that way, to our own detriment.

The encouraging thing about all of these research findings showing the outsized benefits of just being a little bit nice is that they’re achievable. They don’t require Herculean efforts, years of training, or a brain transplant. You already have these values. They’re a basic piece of nearly everyone’s conscience. It just requires that you remember to lend a little bit of attention to other people. You are all equipped to do this. You are all capable of lending your attention to other people in a way that will allow you to do impressive things that you’d never be able to do on your own.

You don’t achieve great things in your job, or your life, alone. You achieve them by working, in cooperation, together, with others. Managing this successfully does not require you to be a saintly person; it simply requires a little bit of attention to others. It requires you to be a decent person. To be fair and kind to others. To create jobs that give other people a sense of pride and accomplishment. To be the kind of person who gives a little more to an organization, to a family, or to a friendship, than you take from it.

All of you getting your degrees today are hoping to live a good life. I wish all of you the best in achieving that life, a life that brings success, accomplishment, and happiness—and keeps those sitting both in front of you and behind you feeling proud of you long after this graduation is over. I think you will need a lot less luck in achieving this good life if you remember, at every step along the way, to be a little bit nice.

Works cited

Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder, “Mistakenly Seeking Solitude,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, October 2014.

Nadav Klein and Nicholas Epley, “The Topography of Generosity: Asymmetric Evaluations of Prosocial Actions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, December 2014.

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