I'm Angela Duckworth.

I'm Mike Mann.

And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show, can you be too agreeable?

What can I do to help you solve your problem?

Hello, Angela.

We are on our fourth personality trait of the big five.

These have gone fast.

Oh, my gosh.

Three down.

Here we go.

So today we are talking about agreeableness.

Right.

And we have a great question to set this up.

Hi, NSQ.

It's really important to me to be kind and empathetic.

I volunteer.

I donate to many charities and nonprofits, and I try to give everyone I meet the benefit of the doubt.

I don't regret any of these behaviors, but I've been taken advantage of many times because of them.

Friends always know that I'll help out when they need help moving or want to ride home from the airport, but they are suddenly busy when it's time to reciprocate.

I've also been scammed out of money when I thought I was helping someone in need.

My therapist tells me that I'm too nice, but I don't want to be meaner.

Basically, my question is, can you be too agreeable?

Faith.

Mike, I assume that Faith, who probably took the big five inventory on our website, scored really high in big five agreeableness.

And I'm going to guess that you also scored super high in this personality factor.

So this was my lowest of the positive scores.

No.

I got a four out of five in agreeableness.

Really?

It was your lowest one?

Can't believe that.

Yes.

Well, I mean, except for neuroticism, which you want to be low.

Yes.

Yes.

So I scored a four.

What was your score?

And what are the scores for our NSQ listeners?

Well, I scored a 4.33.

So not that different from you.

And our listeners scored 3.83.

So a little bit lower than you.

The national average is almost exactly the average for our NSQ listeners.

So we are like straight up the middle of the alley for agreeableness compared to adults in the United States.

And let me remind you of the six questions that you and I took.

So there were three questions that were positively scored.

I am someone who is compassionate, has a soft heart.

I am someone who assumes the best about people.

I am someone who's respectful, treats others with respect.

And you may recall there were three reverse scored items.

So the more you say, yeah, it's like me, the lower your agreeableness score.

I am someone who is sometimes rude to others.

I'm someone who can be cold and uncaring.

I am someone who tends to find faults with others.

I mean, I will say that big five agreeableness is partly about being a compassionate person.

So I think we should talk about that because that's what Faith is curious about.

But there is a whole other part of big five agreeableness, which is really more about being compliant with other people's requests, not because you're kind hearted or that you are sympathetic, but just that you have this tendency to kind of like fall in line with other people's demands.

Interesting.

I have lived all over the world, but all over the United States as well.

And I found this thing by a journalist named Frank Jacobs called Geopsychology.

Your personality depends on where you live, who was referencing this 2021 study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

And they did a survey on agreeableness in the United States and what regions are, quote unquote, the most agreeable or disagreeable.

And I would love for you to guess.

Oh, my gosh, this is so fun.

I'm going to guess the Northeast, including New York, is the least agreeable.

And I am going to guess that the Midwest is the most agreeable.

Complete stereotyping here.

They found that disagreeableness hangs heaviest over some Western states from Montana to New Mexico, Nevada to the western halves of Kansas and Oklahoma.

But this was my favorite line.

There is an additional grumpiness epicenter in New England.

Oh, there you go.

OK, so I was not wrong.

But the most agreeableness is pronounced in the South, as one might imagine.

Oh, forgot about the South.

But they did, to your point, find an important cluster in Minnesota and the Dakotas where people are very agreeable.

I am no expert on geographic psychology, and I don't want to say that this is scientific fact, but let me speculate that when I talk about these like two faces of agreeableness, there's the compassion element and then there's compliance.

You know, sometimes compliance is also called politeness.

I have not lived in the South, but I wonder whether it's more a polite culture than a truly compassionate culture.

And I say this in part because there were two years in my life where I lived with a group of roommates who were from the South.

I mean, they had that wonderful, like soft accent, Southern charm.

Yeah, they were just like, I guess for somebody who grew up in New Jersey, it was just so charming.

They always were polite, I mean, always solicitous and like, no problem.

But then after some months, I realized that there were times where they were totally irritated with me or totally irritated with other people.

And I got to see it when we would come home from some dinner party where they had been exceedingly polite and seemingly kind.

But then they would come home and just thrash the person.

So I do kind of wonder about the finding that, you know, people from the South are more agreeable because, I mean, you know, you could be polite and compassionate, but I think politeness and compassion or compliance and compassion, I mean, they're not the same thing.

And I do think it's worth asking the question whether you can have too much of these tendencies.

What's your instinct on this?

Yeah, obviously.

Oh, really?

You're like, this is an easy question.

For me, it is in the workplace, for example.

I really look for and benefit from healthy conflict.

And if people feel like they just have to be compassionate, compliant, agreeable, don't get me wrong, it can be an incredible asset when someone, their default is yes, they're going to figure out a way to get things done.

At the same time, it's really damaging when people are just willing to say yes to everything.

You never get to the best answer.

And if leaders haven't set up a culture where you can give feedback, where there can be this healthy conflict, where people are willing to push back and be, quote unquote, not agreeable in the moment, then you lose the ability to get to the right answer and you just end up with the opinion of the highest ranking person.

So what does it look like when people don't do that?

Do you think the conflict goes underground, like people go to the bathroom together and like my two roommates, you know, just start talking trash and then they come back in the room and like everything's fine?

Or do you think it's that people just like kind of stop thinking hard about what really should get done?

I think both of those probably happen.

Right.

And again, I'm going to put that on both sides.

Like people have to be willing to speak up and you have to create a culture where people feel safe to speak up.

Right.

If you think like, oh, the goal in life is just to go from a three in agreeableness to a four and from a four in agreeableness to a five, it does actually raise these questions about like, well, what if you really disagree with somebody at work?

What if you feel like you're getting taken advantage of like faith does, like you're basically being a doormat?

So there does seem to be this really messy nuance to it, which is like it can't always be the right thing to say yes to agree and maybe not even the right thing to like always be thinking about other people.

I was talking to our friend Adam Grant, who, as you know, is a professor of management at Wharton.

So when Adam came to my university, you know, University of Pennsylvania, which made him happy enough that we could recruit him.

But immediately we got into an argument like from like minute three.

We were like, that doesn't make sense.

And it's because we started talking about research and Adam was studying being a giver, you know, somebody who really asked the question, what can I do to help you?

And I think, you know, he's always been interested actually in the dynamic between men and women in the workplace.

And he was very interested in how in his observation, a lot of women ask exactly that question.

What can I do to help you solve your problem?

And a lot of men were asking the question, what can you do to help me solve my problem?

And he saw this asymmetry and he saw these female givers who were getting taken advantage of.

They were getting all the scut work, you know, like, well, somebody's got to write up the minutes from this meeting and like somebody's got to like start the word document.

He saw that clearly men were less likely to volunteer for those tasks to concede when asked.

I get into this argument with him now.

This is years ago.

I have since evolved.

But at the time I was defending the position that more and more and more giving was the right and right and right thing.

So I was a little bit like Faith.

I was like, isn't it just the right thing to be as altruistic as possible?

And then Adam said, no, you know, you're going to be a doormat.

And then he gave me this counter proposal.

He's like, look, here's the way to be a giver who doesn't get taken advantage of.

When you give, always ask yourself, what's the problem that I'm solving for this other person?

And at the same time, how does this benefit me?

I had like an allergic reaction.

I was like, that's not the way my mother raised me.

No, I have the same allergic reaction.

Doesn't that just sound like Machiavellian?

I want to govern my life as a good person who does things just because it's the right thing to do, not because there's anything in for me.

Right.

I mean, intuitively, doesn't it ruin it when the gift has an ulterior motive?

I think we share that instinct completely.

Speaking of our friend Adam Grant, he wrote something with his wife in The New York Times where he talks a lot about this idea of self-sacrifice versus generosity.

He said those are pretty different things.

Self-sacrifice is not sustainable and it isn't healthy because people who only care about others tend to kind of neglect themselves, which leads to more anxiety, more depression, et cetera.

Whereas those who are generous, it's not about the self-sacrifice.

It's about giving in ways that nurture more givers.

They said being less selfless actually allows you to give more because instead of letting people sap your energy, you maintain your motivation.

That's something I can agree with.

That is exactly what he said in that argument.

Yeah, but what you're repeating here is that it was also what's in it for me.

I guess the phrasing for me matters a lot because if it's like, hey, I'll do this to help you, but only if it also helps me, that feels just messed up.

Yeah, and I think actually that's eventually where his thinking evolved, because as I said, this is years and years and years ago.

I think it was before he started writing books and in the book Give and Take, Adam has this typology.

There are three kinds of people.

One kind of person is a giver.

They're primarily motivated to help other people solve their problems.

One kind of person is a taker.

They're primarily motivated to get ahead and to relate to other people with the same kind of thing, like, hey, what can you do to solve my problems?

Also, there's the possibility that you're a matcher.

And the matcher is actually the thing that we were just describing, like, I'll do this for you if you do something for me.

I'll do a favor for you on Monday because on Tuesday I might need you to do a favor for me.

And this nuance here is that it is possible to think about this as more sustainable giving, as you said.

Not like I'm a matcher.

It's tit for tat.

It's quid pro quo.

But it's more like, how am I going to do this without becoming like an exhausted, burnt out, cynical, detached, on the brink of quitting person?

And I think the sustainable part isn't always, oh, because you're going to do something for me, but something different.

Like, I remember we got a voice memo from one of our NSQ listeners from now, you know, a year and a half back, and they worked in some kind of charitable work.

And they said that in their many years of working in that sector and also hiring people, what they had learned is to not hire people with a, quote, savior complex.

And the listener goes on to describe how when you hire somebody who's like a martyr, you know, it's like, I won't eat lunch, you can have all my money.

And like every person that I come across, I have to save them too, that you just know they're going to burn out.

That's the nuance, maybe not that you should go through life as a matcher and you should always look for like what you can get out of things when you give, but just that you should find a sustainable, self-propelling way, because otherwise you do, I think, eventually get to the end of your rope.

The other group that I find somewhat difficult, and again, on the surface, it may seem positive, is people pleasers.

Well, how would you describe people pleasers?

Well, if I may, I'd love to borrow because I read an article from a journalist and psychologist named Julie Fraga in the Washington Post, and I feel like she summarized it better than I can, truthfully.

So she said, here are some signs of a chronic people pleaser.

Over apologizing, taking responsibility for other people's feelings, agreeing even when you don't, saying yes to avoid conflict and feeling like your needs don't matter.