1: We are sitting at a table across from a complete stranger.
Each of us is given four tokens.
Each token is worth one dollar if we keep it. But it’s worth two dollars if we give it to the other person.
This game consists of a single decision: How many tokens do we give the other person?
As it turns out, this is a complex decision. If we give away all of our tokens, we might end up with nothing, Daniel Coyle writes in The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups.
Most people give away an average of 2.5 tokens to a stranger—slightly biased toward cooperation.
What gets interesting is how people behave when they are made to feel more vulnerable.
“In one experiment,” Daniel writes, “subjects were asked to deliver a short presentation to a roomful of people who had been instructed by experimenters to remain stone-faced and silent.”
Afterward, they played the “Give-Some Game” described above.
What do we think will happen? Having been through a difficult experience, those in the study would likely be less cooperative, right?
Wrong.
The reverse is true: The speakers’ level of cooperation increases by 50 percent.
“That moment of vulnerability did not reduce willingness to cooperate but boosted it,” Daniel notes.
And the opposite is also true. “Increasing people’s sense of power,” he writes, “tweaking a situation to make them feel more invulnerable—dramatically diminished their willingness to cooperate.”
Woah.
2: The connection between how vulnerable we feel and how likely we are to cooperate also applies to groups.
David DeSteno of Northeastern University designed an experiment “where participants were asked to perform a long, tedious task on a computer that was rigged to crash just as they were completing it,” Daniel writes.
Ugh.
Next, one of the fellow participants, who in reality is an actor working with the researchers, offers to spend some time “fixing” the computer, and successfully restores the data.
Once again, the participants would then play the Give-Some Game.
As we might expect, “those subjects were significantly more cooperative with the person who fixed their computer,” Daniel writes.
But it doesn’t stop there. Afterward, the study participants were equally helpful with total strangers.
“In other words, the feelings of trust and closeness sparked by the vulnerability loop were transferred in full strength to someone who simply happened to be in the room.”
3: The lesson? Vulnerability is contagious.
“We feel like trust is stable,” David says, “but every single moment our brains are tracking the environment, and running a calculation whether we can trust the person around us and bond with them.
“Trust comes down to context. And what drives it is the sense that we’re vulnerable, that we need others and can’t do it on our own.”
We think about trust and vulnerability “the way we think about standing on solid ground and leaping into the unknown,” Daniel writes.
“First, we build trust, then we leap.
“But science is showing us that we’ve got it backward. Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust—it precedes it,” he notes. “Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Think about a high-trust relationship in my life. How would my willingness to be vulnerable or authentic with that person?
Action: Run a small experiment. Lead with vulnerability. Note what happens.
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