A while back I was rather amused to see a story in The Wall Street Journal titled “Hey, You! Mean People Earn More, Study Finds.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904823804576502763895892974.html
The article seemed like just more proof that the world is upside-down and that those who are the meanest folks in the valley fear no evil… Just one more piece of evidence that our intuition that our superiors and the rich fit into our paradigm that “sure we could be like them, if we just got meaner, shed some ethics, and trampled our way to the top.” After all, that shapely blonde in our senior year that we all asked to the prom turned us down and went with that mean football player… after she told us, “bad boys rule…,” and “nice guys finish last.”
Indeed, the psychological study referenced carries the title, “Do Nice Guys – and Gals – Really Finish Last? The Joint Effects of Sex and Agreeableness on Income.”
http://nd.edu/~cba/Nice–JPSPInPress.pdf
But then I got to thinking:
- Why should it be that mean people would make more money?
- Do we like mean people more? Would our bosses?
- Surely it must be a social myth that mean is more effective!
- Mean may seem more vocal and be heard more clearly, but is it more effective?
- In my personal experience, mean corporate cultures can’t retain good people. And I have plenty of empirical observation to back that one up…
- Time wounds all heels – so maybe mean folks may have to change jobs more often – changing jobs is often the best means to a higher salary. So higher salaries might just indicate that mean people change jobs more often.
- Being nice is free…. While being mean often has financial consequences. People treated unfairly tend towards remediation against those who mistreat them. Think about it… People have lots more reasons to get even with mean people.
- Results and effectiveness are what really count in a free market. People really do want to be treated well. Given the choice, people will do business with the entity that provides the most optimum outcome – no one wants to go to a mean dentist or doctor…or buy from the meanest store owner… or promote the meanest person who works for them… So the action-reaction logic doesn’t hold.
So I decided to read the study!
It turns out that the study is really about differentiating financial disparity between agreeable and disagreeable people – both male and female! And my first observation is that “disagreeable” does NOT equal “mean.” Could the title be cleverly constructed for its “sensationalism” factor? Gee whiz… More deceptive marketing…?
If you really want to learn something, you must have a discerning mind. Healthy skepticism… The last thing you want to do is take things at face value. And you surely don’t want to accept – agree with – every little “factoid” that comes your way.
But does a discerning mind and strong doubt about things at face value mean you are “mean?” Of course not. Many of us pick our friends and the folks we like to associate with based on their ability to challenge and stimulate us. A mean person will pick up a hammer and hit you on the foot with it. A disagreeable person will tell the guy who hit your foot that he’s wrong. The disagreeable person will disagree with the mean guy who hit your foot with the hammer… Disagreement keeps us intellectually, morally and ethically honest. Disagreeable people tend to challenge the status quo. They tend to ask “why?” And they tend to iterate logically to the most optimum outcome.
So put disagreeable people on my staff. I don’t want yes men and women! I want disagreeable people to tell me the Emperor has no clothes! I want our actions pressure tested. I want our decisions to be right. That doesn’t happen without discord or rigor. It also doesn’t happen by meanness. It happens out of disagreement with “wrong” – and unwillingness to participate in “wrong.” A manager couldn’t ask for a more values aligned staff…
The following are quotes from the actual paper:
p12 – neuroticism (or its converse, emotional stability) and extraversion have been found to be related to career success (e.g., Ng et al., 2005).
p35-36 - And, since agreeableness is a multi-faceted construct, it is not clear that being rude is the mechanism by which low levels of the trait effect higher income. One might predict stronger effects for assertiveness (Costa, Terracciano, & McCrae, 2001) than for other facets of agreeableness such as politeness (DeYoung, Quilty, & Peterson, 2007). Also, as suggested in Study 3, disagreeable people may value money more highly and, thus, make higher investments in their extrinsic success. For instance, a disagreeable individual might choose to move for a promising promotion that will put him at a distance from extended family while an agreeable man might choose to stay put, concerned with balancing the desire for career advancement with the motivation to maintain strong familial ties. Rudeness plays no part in that equation for either the agreeable or the disagreeable person.
p40 – Solely gauging the relationship of agreeableness with earnings undermines other ways in which people (and society) may benefit from their careers such as the accumulation of social and human capital, impact in one’s chosen field, or degree of fulfillment.
p42 - Nonetheless, we acknowledge that our study does not demonstrate causal order.
p42 - Given the positive contributions made by agreeable people, demonstrated in prior research, it seems that the income penalty for agreeableness is out of proportion with its performance effects. Rather, for men and for women, the effects may be due more to expectations for behavior appropriate to one’s gender.
p42 – This research raises important questions about the standards according to which people are evaluated and sheds further light on the issue of wage inequalities.
Conclusion:
I strongly encourage reading the original paper hyperlinked at the beginning of this piece. It will grant very much more real knowledge than the tiny sensationalized article in Ruppert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal ever will.
Dm 01.31.12
