I once had it explained to me there are two kinds of happiness in the world, additive and subtractive.
In subtractive, a person tries to add happiness to their life by taking it away from other people around them - putting people down, criticizing, picking on people, name calling, etc. Other people are never good enough in their eyes.
In additive, a person adds happiness to their life by giving it to other people around them - compliments, fun activities, positive attitude, etc. Making those around them happier makes the person happier.
It changed my perspective on a lot of people when I viewed their actions in this way.
Interesting idea, but I think you are missing out on the category of happiness that is not related to other people. You can be happy just from your own internal thoughts, actions, accomplishments, without involving other people. I don't even know if the idea of addition and subtraction really apply to internally sourced happiness -- would you just be adding/subtracting from yourself?
You can be, but people are also naturally social. If you're not, you're going to be lonely or an anomaly (and yes, introverts are still social just tend to be with smaller groups).
Since people are naturally social, the people around them are inevitably going to affect their state of mind - especially if we have a desire to be around them.
I expected that to make more sense. Since it started out with the notion that humans are not natural, which is one of my very favorite silly falsehoods, my expectations were shattered rather quickly.
I'm going to disagree here, because this idea took me a long time to develop and has been very helpful.
I spent a long time trying to make myself happier, and I just grew more miserable. I started to work instead on practical goals (I.e fixing the problems i had caused for myself) and found myself to be happier.
Now I think happiness is a natural result of accomplishment things that help you as a person. Pursing happiness directly seems like a category error. It's not a valid goal. The best metaphor I could give you is that "pursuing happiness" is akin to getting in the car and asking your gps "take me to the destination."
It will take you wherever you went last time. Occasionally that may overlap with what's actually good for you, but usually it's wherever you went last time.
"The destination" isn't a meaningful destination. "A gas station", or "a restaurant is."
Now, whenever you start driving, it's true that you are always "headed to the destination" but this is only true in the vacuuous sense of a tautology.
The happiness which results from accomplishing our goals, I now think is a return to a natural baseline state. It's when you don't need anything that you feel happy to just be as you are. Getting to a destination feels good not because "you have arrived", but because you popped the last frame off the goal-seeking stack.
I don't think he said that ALL people who give criticism do so for evil reasons, but that some do. That's entirely consistent with my experience in life.
Not necessarily anyone. Personally, I am becoming more aware myself that when I'm criticizing someone, even indirectly, it's often coming from a desire to elevate myself above them. Think about all the other idiots on the road when you're driving. They're terrible. Thank the heavens you're so much better than them.
> In 2003, scholars from the University of South Carolina looked at the impact of being nice on perceived male attractiveness. They recruited 194 female volunteers to participate in a mock dating game in which they had to pick between two men, Todd and Mike. The researchers varied Todd’s levels of handsomeness and “niceness” while keeping Mike’s personality and looks constant and neutral.
This sounds like a bullshit experiment. I seriously doubt the researchers managed to capture the effective kind of cocky/jerk behavior that works well with some women. Additionally, they're measuring self-reported opinions from women, rather than what the real-world result would be. I say this without any sort of negativity attached to it, but women often say they feel one thing while acting as though they feel another, especially as it pertains to their relationships with men. Again, I don't think this is a negative trait, it just is what it is. I see men all the time acting less than gentlemanly towards women and having the woman verbally shooting him down, but still going home to sleep with him. It's so predictable when done right.
Just want to clarify something here- I think guys too often assume that the "jerk" part of "cocky jerk" is somehow a key component of getting the girl. It's not. The confidence is the important part. A confident, nice guy has just as much of a chance with a girl as a confident, mean guy. I would argue he has a better chance.
The term "Nice Guy" describes a guy who thinks he is being "gentlemanly" when really he's just being shy. I think it's important to distinguish kindness from confidence, lest we all start treating women poorly in an effort to get them to sleep with us.
I disagree to some extent. Men who are successful at being jerks are successful because they're confident. A man can be confident and not a jerk, and the reaction will for some women also be effective, but the reaction will definitely be different. It depends on what the woman is looking for. If she's looking for excitement and something casual, I think the evidence shows that being a jerk is a lot more effective. If she wants a husband, being nice is a lot more effective. But for the most part, you're not going to have much success at cold-openings with women by trying to appeal to their desire to find a husband.
Being "a jerk" to a woman signals that you don't especially value her. It puts her in a frame of mind that you yourself must be valuable to not value her or fawn over her like lots of men do. It makes her chase you instead of you chasing her (which is boring because women get that all the time).
Confidence is what makes it work, but I don't think it's the confidence alone.
The "Confident Jerk" gets the girl mythos comes from men who are just plain jerks but believe themselves to be nice. When confronted with rejection from women, they rely on this mythos to displace blame for their own behavior onto the woman instead.
"It's not me, it's a lack of judgement in her gender!"
That very thought in and of itself defines one as a jerk, imo. Of course people like and prefer to be around nice people.
Yours and the comment you're replying to sound so reductive. People are different. They like other people for lots of different reasons that can't be reduced to a single trait or even a handful of traits. There are 7 billion people on this planet, and you are both generalizing this stuff to the moon.
> the effective kind of cocky/jerk behavior that works well with some women
Some guys come to think that they are not cocky/jerky, but other guys are, and that this behavior "works well with some women".
It's odd to me how they can think this, although it's odd to me people have religious or other irrational beliefs.
An attractive man can be so attractive that he can be cocky or a jerk and yet still be attractive. It is that simple. If a man is less attractive, if he is a jerk that makes him even less attractive.
Let us say for the sake of argument that Dan Bilzerian acts like a jerk towards women. He is still a famous, fit, young millionaire. So that can be seen as one minus among a number of pluses. Perhaps another guy is unknown, very overweight, ten years older and broke. He acts nice, but gets little response, then sees Dan be a jerk, yet still be attractive. The reaction to this is not, "maybe I should work out and get fit" or "maybe I should work and make money", but "maybe I should be a jerk instead of being nice". Sorry, adding one more negative attribute to your pile of negative attributes is not going to help. Attractive guys are attractive despite the ability to be a jerk, not because of it.
I mean, Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali might be cocky before a match, but they could back it up with skill. Them talking trash before some matches is not what is central to their ability. It's an outgrowth of it. The crummiest player can talk trash before a match too.
I guess if a guy is unattractive, it's more comforting for him to think it is not because he out of shape or narcissitic or broke or unsocial or uptight, but it's because he's too nice and too great of a guy. It's surely one of the roots of this bizarre idea that girls don't want someone nice, they want a jerk. Actually, they want someone so attractive that girls still want them even if they act like a jerk.
>It's surely one of the roots of this bizarre idea that girls don't want someone nice, they want a jerk.
You're entitled to your opinion, and your opinion is based on your experiences. You don't really say what your experiences are so it's hard to discuss where I think you're thought process is wrong.
If you take the adjective "jerk" literally then yeah you're right, it's not very effective. When I say "jerk" I say it tongue in cheek, because that's how men describe it when they're passive push-overs without any confidence to do anything other than be entirely submissive to women.
Being a "jerk" is: independence, confidence, aloofness towards incoming negativity, tenacity in facing superficial barriers, and a healthy lack of ego while maintaining a sense of self-worth. People who lack these attributes have their self-esteem threatened when they see others who have it, hence the reason they look like "jerks" even though that's a list of great personality traits.
Also something worth mentioning: women want both. They want a jerk and they want a nice guy. They want to date the jerk but marry the nice guy. The problem is a single man struggles to be both. This means you have women who are unhappy that their jerk boyfriend won't commit, or they're unhappy because they're sexually unattracted to their nice husband despite how good he is with the kids. This is of course a huge hyperbole and generalization, and there are plenty of marriages where a man provides both roles just fine. My point is that lots of women want both roles, but it's hard to find both in a single man.
"In my view, the fact that niceness beats physical beauty is evidence of the existence of God."
Wait, what? Isn't this a highly subjective and religious claim that comes out of nowhere and isn't relevant to the article? Or is that a commonly used expression I am unaware of?
To me it seemed to be written entirely as a joke. The idea being that this is an example of inherit goodness in the universe that we don't often see since the entire model is based on ever-dwindling entropy. The universe is pessimistic by nature if you think about it.
Yeah that was weird for me too, just seemed random but I guess it was kind of a flat joke?
Also the study referenced didn't look at who women actually choose to date, but rather which of two completely hypothetical guys they would choose to date based off some script, which seems pretty worthless to me. I mean, of course in a completely hypothetical situation people are generally going to make a more noble decision than they are likely to make in a real world situation.
Ask 100 men if they'd rather date a nice, intelligent, average looking woman than a dim hot one and I'd bet most will say they'll go for the nice, smart, average looking one, but if the situation were a real-life choice (naturally presented without any 3rd parties to actively judge their answer directly), I'm guessing the real-world results would skew very different from the hypothetical results.
That alone made me stop reading. That's the biggest pile of crap I ever heard. How on earth is that evidence. Does the author even know how to science?
> Selfish nastiness is all the rage, but research shows that pleasant behavior leads to more success and happiness in life
What does the first part of the sentence mean? Where is "selfish nastiness" considered good? Even on social media the jerks are either blocked, ignored, or waste time in silly arguments. If people are rude in the media, it's because watching people be nice all day isn't very fun.
>What does the first part of the sentence mean? Where is "selfish nastiness" considered good?
In political candidates with strange hairdos who attract a huge majority of the population, in fictional pop heroes like Dr. Gregory House, in actual pop heroes like Kanye West and numerous other places besides...
House is basically a modern interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, with the same unpleasant personality. Which seems to contradict the idea that jerk protagonists are a new phenomenon.
> In political candidates with strange hairdos who attract a huge majority of the population
Such as? (I can think of relecat, current examples if you said "a significant minority of the population", but I'm having more trouble with examples that fit the "huge majority" description.)
When you're involved in modern journalism, the apparent first thing they teach you is to exaggerate in the service of emotional resonance to manipulate your audience into agreeing with your fact-free premise to follow.
If it comes to politics or talk radio, if you agree with the jerks position and enjoy them railing against and lampooning the opposition, they appear to be able to do well.
One person's silly comedy can be another persons vicious behavior.
I think we need a better public awareness about what constitutes sound science and research, one that rests on the foundation that unless a study hasn't been replicated and studied in a meta study or two, it's not good enough for the general public.
I suspect there's a positive feedback loop. (And one in the opposite direction, too: Unhappy people are crabbier, and that works out in ways that make them more unhappy...)
I can't read that, but I've thought about this subject and I'll give my two cents.
Let me preface this by saying that I always seem to regret being nice. It's the people that are mostly unaware of others that seem to be the most happy. These same people don't seem to have a problem being cruel as the feeling comes to them.
This doesn't sound good, but it's true. This doesn't have much to do with this story though.
A couple years ago I was on the bus and this kind of thing was on my mind. Over the years my best friend and I have switched between who was more dominant and a couple years ago it was him. He wasn't nice about this either.
On the bus there was a woman and what I assume to be her two daughters. The daughters were kind of playing around the bus and climbing on things. One daughter was obviously more dominant; she was the one basically deciding what game they were playing and she didn't let the other forget that it was 'her game'. After the dominant one was particularly rude, the other went off and did her own thing and start playing behind a seat or something. She seemed to be pretty amused with what she was doing.
After a while the dominant one got bored and went to see what her sister was doing. After seeing that she was having fun, the dominant one joined in and her sister accepted in an obvious way, because she was still busy amusing herself. After that they seemed to have an equal understanding with eachother.
I don't know about nice people having more fun, but the moral if the story is if you have more fun people will be nicer to you.
I've worked as a Greeter in a Health Clinic for 6 years and I get paid to be "nice." Here's what's interesting: Not everyone likes when I'm nice to them - in fact, some of them get downright offended. I don't let it bother me but their reaction seems based on fear.
It's interesting because smiling is free - it literally costs nothing. However, a smile does have value, and is an emotional transaction with another person. A simple smile can sometimes have more impact than we can understand.
Having said that, a smile is also something we should never expect or demand from someone else. That's what makes them so special when they are freely given.
Subheader: Selfish nastiness is all the rage, but research shows that pleasant behavior leads to more success and happiness in life.
Full text:
The great comedian Mel Brooks once contrasted comedy and tragedy. “Tragedy is when I cut my finger,” he said. “Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
Mr. Brooks neatly encapsulates our current public culture of selfish nastiness. From this year’s ghastly presidential race, to the reality entertainment that spawned it, to the open sewer backing up from your Twitter feed, it looks like the worst behavior is being publicly rewarded, doesn’t it? You could be forgiven for believing that maybe the polarities of karma have reversed, and the world now belongs to jerks. Right?
Wrong. Nice people, rejoice: Notwithstanding the prominent examples today in political and popular culture, the best available research still clearly shows that in everyday life the nice people, not the creeps, do the best at work, in love and in happiness.
Let’s start with the job market. This has been another brutal year in which to graduate. Research from the Economic Policy Institute finds that young college graduates’ underemployment rate is nearly a third higher today than it was in 2007. Everyone is looking for an edge.
That edge is being pleasant and friendly. In one 2015 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, a team of scholars from France and the U.S. looked at the impact of civility and warmth to colleagues on perceived leadership and job performance. In addition to being seen as natural leaders by co-workers, nice employees performed significantly better than others in performance reviews by senior supervisors. For those who make it to leadership, niceness is also a key to success. A 2015 NBC poll found that most people would take a nicer boss over a 10% pay increase.
On the other hand, some researchers believe there are salary costs to being nice. In 2012, research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that while those with high levels of “agreeableness” were less likely to be fired, they didn’t make the most money.
It is important to note that these researchers’ definition of agreeableness included “compliance” with the will of others. In many cases, however, compliance is not niceness; it is weakness. To be truly nice is not to comply when you disagree, but rather to disagree without being disagreeable. It isn’t to please at any cost, but rather to avoid being unpleasant even while standing up for what is right.
The benefits of being nice extend to love. In 2003, scholars from the University of South Carolina looked at the impact of being nice on perceived male attractiveness. They recruited 194 female volunteers to participate in a mock dating game in which they had to pick between two men, Todd and Mike. The researchers varied Todd’s levels of handsomeness and “niceness” while keeping Mike’s personality and looks constant and neutral.
The results were clear and conclusive. When their looks were equivalent, “Nice Todd” outperformed Neutral Mike. “Jerk Todd” lost 85% of the time to Mike even when Todd was better looking. In my view, the fact that niceness beats physical beauty is evidence of the existence of God.
But probably the greatest benefit of being nice accrues to one’s own happiness. In 2010, two British researchers looked at the effects of engaging in small daily acts of kindness. Their results, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, show clear causal evidence that kind acts, systematically deployed, raised the participants’ self-judged happiness.
It’s important to note that kindness and niceness are not identical. Kindness requires active generosity. But if you wonder whether the same experimental results will stand up, use yourself as a guinea pig. Deliberately set out to be nice for a week and see how it makes you feel. I’m confident you will like the result.
Can anyone learn to be nice? No doubt it is harder for some people than for others, but anyone can make progress and see benefits. One simple strategy for doing so is mimicry: Imitate the nicest person you know.
In my own case, that was my father. My dad died fairly young, at age 66. Hundreds of people who had known him over the years showed up at his funeral, and everyone I spoke to offered more or less the same observation: He was a truly nice man. Not a bad legacy, I thought. So I set out to imitate a few of his habits.
The most salient was his cheerful interaction with total strangers. He made banter with supermarket clerks, bellmen, bus drivers—everyone. “Hot enough for ya?” he’d ask, especially in winter. This mortified me as a child, especially when his friendliness so frequently went unrequited. But he didn’t care—if his clichés and corny jokes didn’t get a smile from one person, they might from the next. So now, to the chagrin of my own teenage children, I do the same. It has made me a happier person.
Niceness certainly is not a substitute for more active virtues like generosity and courage. But it’s a good start, and perhaps the easiest way to improve our lives. These days it is also a countercultural statement. To be nice is to subvert a pop culture that celebrates tactical nastiness—and instead choose a long-term personal strategy to build a happier life in a better world.
Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute.
Thanks, I really appreciate your effort copying the article here. Could you please do this for all paywalled content from now on? Or maybe we should have a bot do it just in case you have something different planned for the rest of your life.
> For those who make it to leadership, niceness is also a key to success. A 2015 NBC poll found that most people would take a nicer boss over a 10% pay increase.
Doesn't this mean that most bosses are not nice, ergo niceness makes it less likely to get a promotion?
Of people prefer a pay increase over a nicer boss that would prove that nice people get promoted more often.
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In subtractive, a person tries to add happiness to their life by taking it away from other people around them - putting people down, criticizing, picking on people, name calling, etc. Other people are never good enough in their eyes.
In additive, a person adds happiness to their life by giving it to other people around them - compliments, fun activities, positive attitude, etc. Making those around them happier makes the person happier.
It changed my perspective on a lot of people when I viewed their actions in this way.
Since people are naturally social, the people around them are inevitably going to affect their state of mind - especially if we have a desire to be around them.
It's where you spend time devising philosophies on human nature that make you feel superior to others.
When I do work to make others happy, it tends to make me feel better to. It's not zero-sum.
[1] http://unbound-rationality.blogspot.nl/2009/01/law-of-conser...
Deleted Comment
I spent a long time trying to make myself happier, and I just grew more miserable. I started to work instead on practical goals (I.e fixing the problems i had caused for myself) and found myself to be happier.
Now I think happiness is a natural result of accomplishment things that help you as a person. Pursing happiness directly seems like a category error. It's not a valid goal. The best metaphor I could give you is that "pursuing happiness" is akin to getting in the car and asking your gps "take me to the destination."
It will take you wherever you went last time. Occasionally that may overlap with what's actually good for you, but usually it's wherever you went last time.
"The destination" isn't a meaningful destination. "A gas station", or "a restaurant is." Now, whenever you start driving, it's true that you are always "headed to the destination" but this is only true in the vacuuous sense of a tautology.
The happiness which results from accomplishing our goals, I now think is a return to a natural baseline state. It's when you don't need anything that you feel happy to just be as you are. Getting to a destination feels good not because "you have arrived", but because you popped the last frame off the goal-seeking stack.
There's a difference between constructive criticism, and people for whom criticism is the dominant mode of conversation.
This sounds like a bullshit experiment. I seriously doubt the researchers managed to capture the effective kind of cocky/jerk behavior that works well with some women. Additionally, they're measuring self-reported opinions from women, rather than what the real-world result would be. I say this without any sort of negativity attached to it, but women often say they feel one thing while acting as though they feel another, especially as it pertains to their relationships with men. Again, I don't think this is a negative trait, it just is what it is. I see men all the time acting less than gentlemanly towards women and having the woman verbally shooting him down, but still going home to sleep with him. It's so predictable when done right.
The term "Nice Guy" describes a guy who thinks he is being "gentlemanly" when really he's just being shy. I think it's important to distinguish kindness from confidence, lest we all start treating women poorly in an effort to get them to sleep with us.
Being "a jerk" to a woman signals that you don't especially value her. It puts her in a frame of mind that you yourself must be valuable to not value her or fawn over her like lots of men do. It makes her chase you instead of you chasing her (which is boring because women get that all the time).
Confidence is what makes it work, but I don't think it's the confidence alone.
"It's not me, it's a lack of judgement in her gender!"
That very thought in and of itself defines one as a jerk, imo. Of course people like and prefer to be around nice people.
Some guys come to think that they are not cocky/jerky, but other guys are, and that this behavior "works well with some women".
It's odd to me how they can think this, although it's odd to me people have religious or other irrational beliefs.
An attractive man can be so attractive that he can be cocky or a jerk and yet still be attractive. It is that simple. If a man is less attractive, if he is a jerk that makes him even less attractive.
Let us say for the sake of argument that Dan Bilzerian acts like a jerk towards women. He is still a famous, fit, young millionaire. So that can be seen as one minus among a number of pluses. Perhaps another guy is unknown, very overweight, ten years older and broke. He acts nice, but gets little response, then sees Dan be a jerk, yet still be attractive. The reaction to this is not, "maybe I should work out and get fit" or "maybe I should work and make money", but "maybe I should be a jerk instead of being nice". Sorry, adding one more negative attribute to your pile of negative attributes is not going to help. Attractive guys are attractive despite the ability to be a jerk, not because of it.
I mean, Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali might be cocky before a match, but they could back it up with skill. Them talking trash before some matches is not what is central to their ability. It's an outgrowth of it. The crummiest player can talk trash before a match too.
I guess if a guy is unattractive, it's more comforting for him to think it is not because he out of shape or narcissitic or broke or unsocial or uptight, but it's because he's too nice and too great of a guy. It's surely one of the roots of this bizarre idea that girls don't want someone nice, they want a jerk. Actually, they want someone so attractive that girls still want them even if they act like a jerk.
You're entitled to your opinion, and your opinion is based on your experiences. You don't really say what your experiences are so it's hard to discuss where I think you're thought process is wrong.
If you take the adjective "jerk" literally then yeah you're right, it's not very effective. When I say "jerk" I say it tongue in cheek, because that's how men describe it when they're passive push-overs without any confidence to do anything other than be entirely submissive to women.
Being a "jerk" is: independence, confidence, aloofness towards incoming negativity, tenacity in facing superficial barriers, and a healthy lack of ego while maintaining a sense of self-worth. People who lack these attributes have their self-esteem threatened when they see others who have it, hence the reason they look like "jerks" even though that's a list of great personality traits.
Also something worth mentioning: women want both. They want a jerk and they want a nice guy. They want to date the jerk but marry the nice guy. The problem is a single man struggles to be both. This means you have women who are unhappy that their jerk boyfriend won't commit, or they're unhappy because they're sexually unattracted to their nice husband despite how good he is with the kids. This is of course a huge hyperbole and generalization, and there are plenty of marriages where a man provides both roles just fine. My point is that lots of women want both roles, but it's hard to find both in a single man.
Wait, what? Isn't this a highly subjective and religious claim that comes out of nowhere and isn't relevant to the article? Or is that a commonly used expression I am unaware of?
Also the study referenced didn't look at who women actually choose to date, but rather which of two completely hypothetical guys they would choose to date based off some script, which seems pretty worthless to me. I mean, of course in a completely hypothetical situation people are generally going to make a more noble decision than they are likely to make in a real world situation.
Ask 100 men if they'd rather date a nice, intelligent, average looking woman than a dim hot one and I'd bet most will say they'll go for the nice, smart, average looking one, but if the situation were a real-life choice (naturally presented without any 3rd parties to actively judge their answer directly), I'm guessing the real-world results would skew very different from the hypothetical results.
What does the first part of the sentence mean? Where is "selfish nastiness" considered good? Even on social media the jerks are either blocked, ignored, or waste time in silly arguments. If people are rude in the media, it's because watching people be nice all day isn't very fun.
In political candidates with strange hairdos who attract a huge majority of the population, in fictional pop heroes like Dr. Gregory House, in actual pop heroes like Kanye West and numerous other places besides...
Not criticizing you, but the premise that 'selfish nastiness' is both prevalent, or any more prevalent than it was.
Such as? (I can think of relecat, current examples if you said "a significant minority of the population", but I'm having more trouble with examples that fit the "huge majority" description.)
One person's silly comedy can be another persons vicious behavior.
Maybe happier people are nicer?
Let me preface this by saying that I always seem to regret being nice. It's the people that are mostly unaware of others that seem to be the most happy. These same people don't seem to have a problem being cruel as the feeling comes to them.
This doesn't sound good, but it's true. This doesn't have much to do with this story though.
A couple years ago I was on the bus and this kind of thing was on my mind. Over the years my best friend and I have switched between who was more dominant and a couple years ago it was him. He wasn't nice about this either. On the bus there was a woman and what I assume to be her two daughters. The daughters were kind of playing around the bus and climbing on things. One daughter was obviously more dominant; she was the one basically deciding what game they were playing and she didn't let the other forget that it was 'her game'. After the dominant one was particularly rude, the other went off and did her own thing and start playing behind a seat or something. She seemed to be pretty amused with what she was doing.
After a while the dominant one got bored and went to see what her sister was doing. After seeing that she was having fun, the dominant one joined in and her sister accepted in an obvious way, because she was still busy amusing herself. After that they seemed to have an equal understanding with eachother.
I don't know about nice people having more fun, but the moral if the story is if you have more fun people will be nicer to you.
It's interesting because smiling is free - it literally costs nothing. However, a smile does have value, and is an emotional transaction with another person. A simple smile can sometimes have more impact than we can understand.
Having said that, a smile is also something we should never expect or demand from someone else. That's what makes them so special when they are freely given.
Kindness is the International Currency.
Full text:
The great comedian Mel Brooks once contrasted comedy and tragedy. “Tragedy is when I cut my finger,” he said. “Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
Mr. Brooks neatly encapsulates our current public culture of selfish nastiness. From this year’s ghastly presidential race, to the reality entertainment that spawned it, to the open sewer backing up from your Twitter feed, it looks like the worst behavior is being publicly rewarded, doesn’t it? You could be forgiven for believing that maybe the polarities of karma have reversed, and the world now belongs to jerks. Right?
Wrong. Nice people, rejoice: Notwithstanding the prominent examples today in political and popular culture, the best available research still clearly shows that in everyday life the nice people, not the creeps, do the best at work, in love and in happiness.
Let’s start with the job market. This has been another brutal year in which to graduate. Research from the Economic Policy Institute finds that young college graduates’ underemployment rate is nearly a third higher today than it was in 2007. Everyone is looking for an edge.
That edge is being pleasant and friendly. In one 2015 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, a team of scholars from France and the U.S. looked at the impact of civility and warmth to colleagues on perceived leadership and job performance. In addition to being seen as natural leaders by co-workers, nice employees performed significantly better than others in performance reviews by senior supervisors. For those who make it to leadership, niceness is also a key to success. A 2015 NBC poll found that most people would take a nicer boss over a 10% pay increase.
On the other hand, some researchers believe there are salary costs to being nice. In 2012, research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that while those with high levels of “agreeableness” were less likely to be fired, they didn’t make the most money.
It is important to note that these researchers’ definition of agreeableness included “compliance” with the will of others. In many cases, however, compliance is not niceness; it is weakness. To be truly nice is not to comply when you disagree, but rather to disagree without being disagreeable. It isn’t to please at any cost, but rather to avoid being unpleasant even while standing up for what is right.
The benefits of being nice extend to love. In 2003, scholars from the University of South Carolina looked at the impact of being nice on perceived male attractiveness. They recruited 194 female volunteers to participate in a mock dating game in which they had to pick between two men, Todd and Mike. The researchers varied Todd’s levels of handsomeness and “niceness” while keeping Mike’s personality and looks constant and neutral.
The results were clear and conclusive. When their looks were equivalent, “Nice Todd” outperformed Neutral Mike. “Jerk Todd” lost 85% of the time to Mike even when Todd was better looking. In my view, the fact that niceness beats physical beauty is evidence of the existence of God.
But probably the greatest benefit of being nice accrues to one’s own happiness. In 2010, two British researchers looked at the effects of engaging in small daily acts of kindness. Their results, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, show clear causal evidence that kind acts, systematically deployed, raised the participants’ self-judged happiness.
It’s important to note that kindness and niceness are not identical. Kindness requires active generosity. But if you wonder whether the same experimental results will stand up, use yourself as a guinea pig. Deliberately set out to be nice for a week and see how it makes you feel. I’m confident you will like the result.
Can anyone learn to be nice? No doubt it is harder for some people than for others, but anyone can make progress and see benefits. One simple strategy for doing so is mimicry: Imitate the nicest person you know.
In my own case, that was my father. My dad died fairly young, at age 66. Hundreds of people who had known him over the years showed up at his funeral, and everyone I spoke to offered more or less the same observation: He was a truly nice man. Not a bad legacy, I thought. So I set out to imitate a few of his habits.
The most salient was his cheerful interaction with total strangers. He made banter with supermarket clerks, bellmen, bus drivers—everyone. “Hot enough for ya?” he’d ask, especially in winter. This mortified me as a child, especially when his friendliness so frequently went unrequited. But he didn’t care—if his clichés and corny jokes didn’t get a smile from one person, they might from the next. So now, to the chagrin of my own teenage children, I do the same. It has made me a happier person.
Niceness certainly is not a substitute for more active virtues like generosity and courage. But it’s a good start, and perhaps the easiest way to improve our lives. These days it is also a countercultural statement. To be nice is to subvert a pop culture that celebrates tactical nastiness—and instead choose a long-term personal strategy to build a happier life in a better world.
Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute.
So does this mean Mel Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute? I wonder if that is considered comedy or tragedy?
Doesn't this mean that most bosses are not nice, ergo niceness makes it less likely to get a promotion?
Of people prefer a pay increase over a nicer boss that would prove that nice people get promoted more often.