Writing a Book for Real People: On Giving the Psychology of Giving Away

Give and Take

This led me to the core question for my book: Many people believe selfishness is the path to success, but is it possible that we might accomplish more when we focus on helping others? I needed a framework to anchor my ideas about prosocial motivation, and I noticed a common denominator across theories of equity sensitivity (Huseman, Hatfield, & Miles, 1987), relational models (Fiske, 1992), value orientations (Van Lange, 1999), and relationship orientations (Clark & Mills, 1993). They converged around three styles of interaction that I have come to call giving, taking, and matching. Givers have been described as prosocial, following the principles of benevolence, communal sharing, and generosity: They enjoy helping others. Takers are selfish: They aim to get more than they give. Matchers are balanced: They subscribe to the norm of reciprocity, making sure exchanges are equal and favors are traded fairly. The book would ask whether givers, takers, or matchers achieve the greatest success.

Following the advice of colleagues who had written books, I signed with a brilliant literary agent, Richard Pine, and started writing a book proposal. I got so immersed in writing that I accidentally wrote a draft of the book that summer. Richard gently told me it read like an academic journal article, not something a broad audience would want to read (at which point I became intimately acquainted with a dark side of flow: tunnel vision). He told me to write like I teach, and I threw away about 102,000 words and started over from scratch.

To approach my writing more like my teaching, I made three changes. First, instead of attempting to cover all the relevant evidence, I focused on the most important evidence in the text and moved additional references to endnotes and occasional wrinkles to footnotes. Second, rather than always leading with research, I organized each chapter around key evidence but then went searching for stories. Some of my favorite stories posed puzzles that would be resolved by data or featured surprising twists that would be illuminated by data. I learned that there are two kinds of characters that prove particularly compelling: People who are well known but have unknown back stories, and people who are unknown but have distinctive skills, habits, or experiences worth knowing. Third, I shifted from academic jargon to more memorable, recognizable terms (prosocials became givers, reciprocators became matchers, egoists became takers).

A year later, the result was a more accessible book: Give and Take (Grant, 2013). My core thesis was that givers were overrepresented on both extremes of success: They made up a disproportionate number of the worst performers and the best performers. Givers were more likely to fail in the short run but succeed in the long run: Over time, the effort they invested in solving other people’s problems led to unexpected learning, motivation, and social capital benefits. But whether those benefits emerged depended on whether givers also had self-concern.

Self-concern and concern for others are independent, not opposites (Batson, 1998; De Dreu & Nauta, 2009; Frimer, Walker, Dunlop, Lee, & Riches, 2011; Helgeson & Fritz, 1998; Meglino & Korsgaard, 2004), and my research suggested that successful givers were high on both motives (Grant & Berry, 2011; Grant & Mayer, 2009). This is different from matching: They did not expect something back from each person they helped. They were thoughtful givers, helping without strings attached but being careful not to sacrifice themselves along the way, which meant setting boundaries with takers (e.g., Amanatullah, Morris, & Curhan, 2008) and helping in ways that they found intrinsically motivating rather than exhausting and obligated (e.g., Grant, 2008a; Yam, Klotz, He, & Reynolds, 2017). They also protected their time to get their own work done (e.g., Perlow, 1999; Rapp, Bachrach, & Rapp, 2013) and batched their giving into weekly chunks (Allan, Duffy, & Collisson, 2018; Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005). Meanwhile, I covered evidence that takers may rise quickly as they climb the shortest path to success but often fall at the hands of matchers, who spread prosocial gossip to protect other people against the takers (Feinberg, Willer, Stellar, & Keltner, 2012). And although matchers play a key role in enabling the success of givers, their stance is too transactional for a world that is not zero-sum.

As I was finishing the book in the summer of 2012, I got a call out of the blue from a journalist named Susan Dominus. She said that she had considered organizational psychology as a career, but a friend convinced her that only an evil Marxist would try to trick people into liking oppressive jobs. She turned to journalism but never lost her interest in our field, and she decided it would be fun to live it vicariously by profiling an organizational psychologist. A mutual friend had referred her to Wendy Smith, who had been a graduate student in a lab I joined as an undergraduate, and Wendy told Susan to contact me.

Susan ended up writing a New York Times Magazine cover story on my work, asking whether giving is the secret to getting ahead (Dominus, 2013). (My answer: no, because if you do it to succeed, it does not work.) Suddenly my inbox was overflowing with questions from strangers: Can you help me fight my medical malpractice lawsuit? (Sorry, I am not a lawyer or a doctor.) Can you help me choose my career? (I would love to help, but giving prescriptive advice, even to students I know well, is not something I like to do.) I had a new puzzle: After reading a bunch of research on the benefits of helping others, if your instinct is not to do more for others but to e-mail the researcher for help, uninvited, does that make you a taker?

Reb Rebele, a University of Pennsylvania instructor who went on to pursue a doctorate in personality psychology at the University of Melbourne, anticipated all of this and offered to create a new role for “prosocial triage” of fielding inbound requests, which he did masterfully. The system he created—perfected by his successor, Grace Cormier, who went on to pursue a doctorate in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School—saved countless hours. We created documents for frequently asked questions, lists of recommended books and articles on key topics in work and psychology, and developed clear priorities about where we could be helpful and where it would make more sense to refer readers elsewhere (see Grant & Rebele, 2017). It also led us to a series of new research questions about how to gauge prosocial motivation and create more efficient ways of scaling help.

Many of the questions from readers crystallized blind spots in my thinking and writing. If I could rewrite the book (third time is the charm?), I would start with three big changes. First, I would not limit my focus to the workplace. As a first-time author, I stayed close to my core expertise in organizational psychology and management, only learning later how deeply readers care about questions around parenting and education (how do you raise a giver?) and work-life spillover (do people who give more at work pay a price when it comes to family and friends?). Second, I would spend much more time on gender dynamics. I did not devote enough attention to all the evidence on how men get rewarded for giving, whereas women are taken for granted when they help or punished for not helping (e.g., Heilman & Chen, 2005). Finally, I would focus less on trying to convince readers that in the long run, givers tend to often outperform takers. It should be enough to argue that success follows what systems theorists call equifinality: There are multiple paths to the same end. If you can accomplish just as much through giving as taking, is that not a more meaningful and worthwhile way to pursue your ambitions—to try to lift others up instead of cutting them down? Even if helping others is not the best way to succeed, I believe that it is the most meaningful way to succeed.

Looking back on Give and Take 5 years later, it is hard to know what effect the book has had on readers. I know that in the first 4 years, it sold over 300,000 copies, but sales are a very poor proxy for impact. My hope was that it would might lead some card-carrying takers to shift in the giving direction. But the more frequent and more consistently uplifting notes have come from readers who say they were ready to give up on giving before reading the book, and afterward decided to shift their strategies but stick to their values. I have also been delighted to hear from readers who write to share that their career plan was to achieve success and then give back, but they have now expanded their definitions of giving beyond money to include sharing knowledge, teaching skills, offering mentoring, providing social support, and making introductions between people who could benefit from knowing each other. From time to time, I have been pleasantly surprised to hear from CEOs and sports coaches who are working to build cultures of givers in their workplaces and teams and from startup founders and government and nonprofit leaders who are working to prevent burnout. Higher-level access has made it possible to do field experiments on fresh questions but at a larger scale. The book also helped fuel the creation of a knowledge sharing community called Givitas, which is designed according to principles of generalized reciprocity in sociology and political science (Baker & Bulkley, 2014) to allow people to seek and give help. And it is particularly gratifying to learn that my work has led people to consider careers in and around psychological science.

What Might (Not) Have Been

But let me be clear: I was very lucky that the book sold. It requires little skill in counterfactual thinking to imagine a world in which I do not write my own book, I do not have an agent who rescues my train wreck of a first draft, a journalist does not have a friend who talks her out of organizational psychology, and that journalist does not reach me through three degrees of Stanley Milgram. I know how fortunate I was that a door opened, and I have tried to walk through it responsibly. For me, that has meant taking an evidence-based approach to communicating with the public about work and psychological science through writing, speaking, and social media. Most recently I have enjoyed creating a monthly newsletter, Granted, where I share my favorite new insights and weigh in on reader questions, and hosting a podcast, WorkLife, where I go into unconventional workplaces and integrate research to identify ways to make work better.

There is one counterfactual question that looms largest for me: What if psychological scientists did not popularize their work? If a generation of psychological scientists had refused to write outside academic journals, I doubt I would have ever joined the field, let alone had the opportunity to share my ideas. At its heart, psychological science is a giving profession: The science of the mind and behavior offers insight into how to reduce suffering and improve the quality of life. We can take up residence in Pasteur’s quadrant (Stokes, 1997), where we do both basic research that advances fundamental scientific knowledge and applied work that solves meaningful problems in the world. Posttenure, I think we have a responsibility to give our ideas away—not only because it has value to society but also because it has value to us. Sharing research beyond the academy challenges us to converge with interdisciplinary scholars and reflective practitioners, which inevitably leads us to confront new questions and question old answers. And my own research suggests that there are likely to be motivational benefits too: Making a difference can make a difference. When we see our work having a positive impact on others, we often become more productive and creative.