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we often look at our relationships in terms of extremes someone is either a friend or a foe but a new book suggests
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that we should actually be looking at how someone is both a friend and a foe friend and foe is also the title of the
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new book by Wharton Professor morce Schweitzer and Adam galinsky who's a professor at Columbia business school
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they're here today to talk to us a little bit about their book and how you can apply it in both your life and work
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Maurice and Adam thanks for being here thank you thank you now you write that a key Insight of the book is that both at
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work and at home we're competing and cooperating all the time often at the same time you also point out that we
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often miss the mark by focusing the on the discussion about whether it's better
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to do one or the other so wh why is that well I think it starts with the idea that we love to categorize things in our
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world it really helps us navigate our way through our social experience so from a very young age we categorize
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their girls and their boys and that extends to thinking about people as other are friends or our foes we just do
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that natural categorization and and as academics we also do that natural categorization when we construct our
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theories you said you know we missed the mark all the time because it's really
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easy to come up with Theory it says we are born to compete it's also very easy
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to come up with the alternative Theory it's like we have an innate Instinct for
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empathy and so even as academics we're trying to simplify the world to try to
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understand it and it's easy to take that one's lens now to keep both those lenses
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you know and describe this idea there's a tension between them and a balance
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between them it makes the world a little bit more complex although obviously more
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realis realistic um and so this idea that we're competing cooperating all the
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time exists for every relationship in fact it it you know it even exists for co-authors I think right yeah it was
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true for us I mean even going back and forth uh taking terms writing and revising and you know we we talked about
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whose name is going to go first on the book and we had to go with the convention of alphabetical order even
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though you know we both contribute are equally Cadena coin TOS you know there's
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really no difference between um it's just it's just an alphabetical but even
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that you know creates some tension like how are we going to decide who gets to be first who gets to be second because
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being first is still a little bit better you know and so fortunately I was born with a slightly you know earlier name in
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the alphabet but you know it's it's it's you know you see that cooperation
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competition tension existing even as we wrote the book right now you identify actually three forces that influence how
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we shift from friend to Foe and those are scarcity sociability and dynamic instability can you describe each one of
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those one of those and talk a little bit about how they interact with each other
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yeah so you know let me give you one of the examples Us's in the book which I
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really love which is the grevy zebras in Africa now you take these three forces of sociability scarcity and sort of
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dynamic instability and you can see that happen so they have an incredibly scarce
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important resource on the plains of Africa and that's water now when water's
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abundant they form in a particular form of social organization these strong collectives with lots of people
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interacting with each other in stable units around the water sauce but when water becomes scarce then they quickly
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sort of dissipate from the collective form um they they're um uh they form more sort of small bonds with each other
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um and that often are temporary bonds too and so you can see how this scarce resource which is dynamically changing
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over time produces different types of social relationships yeah that's true even with people um we find for example
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siblings often compete for a scarce resarch which is Parental attention and so we have siblings and we think about
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Brotherly Love where siblings can be incredibly collaborative the best of friends but we also think about sibling
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rivalry they can be incredible adversaries often competing for some of these scarce resources and this can
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change quickly dynamically as the family structure changes or even at at the very
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beginning uh breastfeeding for example is one way infants delay the arrival of a new sibling uh that is by
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breastfeeding longer women are less likely to get pregnant and that that preserves their their attention uh for
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for as long as they possibly can and you can even see that change happen let's
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say a parent gets a new job that's more demanding of their attention the family
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structure hasn't changed but now the cooperation might become a little bit more competive
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as they compete for that that scarce resource and one thing that actually connects Maurice and I is that I'm I'm a
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twin and his a wife as a twin and so even in the womb you're competing for scarce resources so I was born much
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smaller than my my my sibling and there's a weight difference for with marica's wife and and her twin sister
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you know I'll give you just one other example think about Thanksgiving Thanksgiving starts as the most
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Cooperative day of the entire year we come together as family and friends we have an abundance of resources all this
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food and then we switch sometimes within an hour of the end of Thanksgiving dinner into one of the most competitive
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moments of the Year Black Friday these what's scarce these incredible deals two
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TVs you know for $30 and what do people do they literally trample each other to death to try to get one of these TVs and
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so we can see these these re scarce resource whether it's a good deal whether it's parental tension whether
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it's water it changes quickly over time and fundamentally Alters social relationships
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now you also have a lot of examples in the book so again I mean where how can we take kind of the daily things that a
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leader of a country goes through which I mean I don't think a lot of us could
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really even imagine but then also we can apply them to our lives I think you know
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I think there's I think we can talk about just three examples of presidents you know one of the things that we talk
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about is um one of the key things that we want to do is we want to Signal trust to other people we want them to trust us
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and since the Advent of Television um every president in the United to Signal trust in one very very simple but
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specific way they get a dog right so take Barack Obama Barack Obama's daughter is allergic to dogs and yet he
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still felt compelled to get a dog Scott Walker he's got two dogs Scott Walker
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headline in the New York Times is Scott Walker allergic to dogs will he defy history by knocking dogs so that's you
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know one of these examples but we also even see like in presidential or uh you know in parliamentary politics right how
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important social comparisons are which is another incredibly important part of the book and you know Maurice has a
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great example there well I mean yeah in the book we talk about uh two brothers David and Ed Miland and if you're from
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the United Kingdom they those will be familiar names they were both vying for the leadership of the labor party in in
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the United Kingdom and uh David was the first to announce that he was going to run and his younger brother Ed announced
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that he was going to compete for that position they went through several rounds of voting and finally at the very
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end uh the younger brother Ed edged out David now this this social comparison there is we're constantly comparing
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ourselves with people around us including our siblings and here that sibling comparison is a really intense one and
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when we go out of order when the younger brother gets Advanced first or we can think about when one sibling gets
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married before another sibling when we go out of order we're making these comparisons that can be very unpleasant
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and and David for example he he not only resigned from Parliament he ended up leaving the country he actually came to
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New York he he didn't do it right away but but he talks about the invidious comparison that was really corrosive for
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him and as a as a final example you know just take presidential debates we're
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going to see Republican debate tomorrow night and the question is you know do I want to like break out on my own or do I
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want to sort of be in step with other people and and one study that I did with some of my colleagues is we actually
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analyzed every transcript of every televised debate and we looked at something really simple did I mimic or
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was my verbal structure similar to the person who asked me the question or the person who I was responding to let's say
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my opponent and now you might think you know if I really use a different sort of
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verbal structure I'm going to show him a leader I'm going to be different but if
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I use a similar verbal structure it shows I'm kind of in tune with you that I'm makes it more smooth it makes it
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easier for you to process what I say and so we actually showed that people who did more verbal mimicry actually got
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higher boost in the polls after the debates now this occurs in every Walk of Life so just for example waitresses
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studies showed that if waitresses mimic the behavior um and words of their customers they get higher tips study I
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did if you know you like to lean back if I lean back a little bit my in my chair
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and we're negotiating I get a better um I get a better deal if you like lean
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forward if I lean forward a little bit towards you I get a better deal and so this mimicry occurs at the presidential
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level you know in restaurants in negotiations at work all over the place there's a lot of examples in the book
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that seem to contradict a lot of commonly held thinking and one of the ones I thought about is you know two
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that really stood out was one that teams may actually be better off when they have less talent and another one is that
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it's actually better to be interviewed last for a job whereas I think our we
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might all think that you know it's it's better to be first because then you're
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first you came in first so I was just curious about like how did that how does that play out like why is what we think
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is true not actually the case yeah so with the talent one you know we call this the too much talent effect um and
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the idea is that when we have a lot of talented people in a group one of the problems that can occur is it can create
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what's called status conflicts like who's really the best person who's going
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to be the alpha person who's going to take control who's going to dominate now
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sometimes that's not really a problem at all let's take a sport sport like
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baseball right um in baseball the more Talent is always better right if we get a bunch of people can hit home runs
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you're always going to win more games a bunch of people can pitch really well
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you're always going to win better but in baseball I don't need to coordinate my
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behavior very much with anyone else I just need to hit the ball as hard as I can now let's take another sport like
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basketball it turns out in basketball you see this too much talent effect you really see this phenomenon where at a
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certain point Talent is helpful but then it goes down and actually hurts you now
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in basketball we have to coordinate our Behavior incredibly well when I'm shooting that means you're not shooting
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and so therefore who gets the ball is a scarce resource in addition it's much
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easier to score if I get the ball in a position close to the basket or there's
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not a Defender so that means it requires a lot of coordination even like rebounding and defense requires a lot of
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coordination and so what we found is when teams get above a certain level of talent they don't coordinate very
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effectively they don't have a lot of assists they have more turnovers and their winning percentage actually goes
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down and just take you know a good example recently was when um the Los Angeles Lakers at Kobe Bryant Dwight
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Howard Steve Nash and even their coach said I don't even like watching us play
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it's like no one likes watching an All-Star game because All-Star game is a Just J bu people jacking up shots this
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is what we have right now is we have an All-Star team but we don't have a real
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team and so you can see this too much talent so the key variable and this is what really matters is how much do you
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and I really have to coordinate if we have to work together as a team you can have too much talent and sometimes you
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do you're you're better off less is more getting a little bit less Talent if we
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don't have to coordinate it all and we're just independent people um whose
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own talents contribute directly to Performance more Talent is always better so it's really cool because we can
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really see like basketball and baseball how one variable interdependency and the
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need for coordination determines whether more Talent is always better or you get
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too much talent I mean related to these sort of structural ideas you can think about uh these order effects you
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mentioned before and in many cases it's better to go last particularly when there are many different competitors or
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we're we're choosing among a lot of different candidates if you look at for
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example American Idol you look at ratings of the Olympics uh going last is a huge benefit particularly when the
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judgments are subjective where one of the things we're doing as judges is we're holding out we leave room in our
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first judgments because we want to see if somebody better might come along by the time we've gotten to the end we no
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longer need to keep that buffer uh and second there's a recency effect that is
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our memories are remarkable but they're limited and we forget things over time
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and our memories are sharpest for the most recent things so there are two benefits at least two benefits that the
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last person receives and you see this play out in a lot of of different competitions where it's often best to go
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last and and you know part of this where I got really interested in this topic was back when I was in grad school I got
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an interview at the University of Chicago great you know job and they wanted me the first one to come in and I
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was back of my mind feel little apprehensive but I asked you know uh a lot of my f professors like oh we always
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want our best candidate come first and I went and interviewed it was the first one interview didn't get the job you
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know and then still kind of thinking in the crawl of my mind about this and then
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I realized in my entire five years at Princeton we had had five Job searches and the last person had gotten hired
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every time and then you know when I was at Kellog and and I got interviewed there I was the last person to be
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interviewed and I got the job and so you can really see how you know the this effect really really takes place I don't
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know if everybody knows this everyone's gonna want to go last now and now there's speaking of job interviews there
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was also something in here that there was also something in here about you guys had a colleague who used a really
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interesting exercise right before her inter interview that actually helped her aset and this was in your chapter about
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power so you tell us a little bit about that yeah so you know many years ago I was trying to understand how to study
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power and you know if you go in the lab and you say you know Maurice you're going to be the boss you know Adam
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you're going to be the subordinate there's a lot of things going on to really just try to understand the basic
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psychological consequences of being in power um other than just the power like Maurice has to think about what am I
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going to say to Adam and direct him um and so we came up with this you know manipulation to study experimentally
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where we just said think about a time when you had power really just sort of recall the experience and what we found
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is that actually the same effects if I if I told marce to think about time you had power is the same effects if I
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actually made him the boss and so what happened is one of my former students Jillian CP who's now a tenur professor
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at London business school but she went for an interview and her first interview was at at Harvard and it didn't go very
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well they really plunged her with question she was kind of knocked off her game she walked out of there feeling
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pretty demoralized and so when she goes to do an interview at London Business School you know she's trying to sort of
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you know regain that sense of confidence and they give you about a half an hour before your talk to settle in she said
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you know what I'm going to do I'm actually going to do Adam's experimental
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manipulation you know just see if it actually get the same effects and so she wrote about a time when she had power
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literally physically wrote it out to really like get into it and then she was complete control of situations she was
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just you know knocking the questions back you know answering things and you know she got the job and you know she's
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still there to this day and it was you know just one of those examples we had another who had been in the market a
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couple times um hadn't done as well went in the market a third time before every
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talk wrote out a um the power Prime um and got four offers that year you know so you can just really see how you know
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you can just by taking this reflection and thinking about time when you had power has this transformative effect
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let's say I mean there a lot of great examples but um but Adams run hundreds
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of studies where not hundreds I mean do yeah probably hundreds uh where where this this experimental manipulation
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brings back it sort of creates a psychological sense of power and it's been incredibly widely uh adopted yeah
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now the book I mean we it stresses that you know we're both cooperating and competing constantly and simultaneously
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but I'm wondering now I mean are some people better at one than the other I mean like if I'm really good at
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confidence but maybe I don't always know how to defer who to defer to like how
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can I use the knowledge about which one I'm better at to sort of help me in these situations kind of check myself
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for example well yeah so so certainly some people tend to be Cooperators some people tend to be competitors and some
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of us are sort of in the middle harder to classify and there's a social value
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orientation scale that can help us classify people so so there are definitely individual differences and
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there are things about a context that can push us one way or another that is there there cues in our environment that
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can easily push us one way or another yeah and I I think you know you asked us really a great question of like how do
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we you know recognize the fact that there always is this tension and we're Co cooperating and competing um and that
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we have to find a balance between these forces and I think about the interview context is a really great one how do we
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do well when we're going for a job interview well we want to express confidence but we also don't want to
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express arrogance so the key balance there is to express confidence as a way to sort of compete well but also to
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express some humility as a way to sort of show cooperation and I think that one of the things that you know Maurice and
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I really think as valuable about this book is that it it allows people to ask themselves the question am I finding the
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right balance am I finding the right am I being exploited so I'm cooperating too
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much am I losing opportunities to make connections because I'm competing too
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much and I think that just by asking ourselves that question periodically maybe once a month it allows us it gives
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us a sense of power it allows us to correct course um but allows just asking the question allows huh no know maybe I
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need to be a little bit more Cooperative to get back more in balance or maybe I need to toughen up a little bit to get
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back more um into the competitive mode and so I think that what we hope this book does is allow people to recognize
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we're always cooperating we're always competing to recognize that tension and
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also to ask ourselves if we're finding the right balance well and I I had one
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other idea which is um something that I tell my students uh I think you a lot of
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us tell our students to keep a journal um for negotiations uh and I tell my students
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you know after the course ends you know keep keep this journal as you go through
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life jot down some things about your negotiation what you expected what surprised you and how things ended and I
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told them to look for one thing in particular if you look back across 10 negotiations and you find that you're
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satisfied with your outcome every single time you're probably not setting your
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goals high enough if you look back across Ross an arc of negotiations and you find that you've ruptured
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relationships nine out of 10 times you're probably being too competitive and so here we can think about looking
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for data to help us bring ourselves back into balance now one of the things I thought
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was interesting I mean you're talking about the individual there but I also found that the book I would think has a
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lot to offer for say I'm a manager and I'm managing a team and I have a diverse
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team of people like really thinking a lot more deeply about the team dynamic and how to deal with them and how to
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kind of structure things so I'm getting the best out of each person we talked
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about social comparisons before we compare ourselves with other people and as a manager we might think well okay
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let's try to make everything equal or let me try to gain trust by by creating
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better transparency and so gravity payments they they made payment information transparent they so they
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shared that information and they brought everybody up to you know sort of equal salaries uh a disaster is sort of and
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and I would say a rather predictable disaster that is we We crave comparisons we we want to know how we're doing
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compared to the people around us that's how we figure things out in our in our
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social world the salary information a really key piece of information um and there's
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a good reason why we don't talk about salaries as freely as as we might um because it's going to make some people
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feel absolutely terrible and when you start moving people's salaries around people are going to find
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inequity uh it's it's easy for us to justify why I should be paid more somebody else should be paid less and
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and it's an easy source for us to become completely miserable and I think in this
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case it's really interesting he was motivated by an incredibly well-meaning intention which is some my employees
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can't afford to live in the Bay Area like they're getting paid $35,000 they
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just can't pay rent what if I just move them up to $70,000 everything's going to
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be great they're going to be able to pay now how do the people who are getting
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paid $70,000 feel now they before were getting paid twice as much and it made them feel like I'm twice as valuable
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maybe they have more valuable jobs maybe they work a little bit harder now they're like you know it means nothing
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right and so then they end up getting and quitting and then you actually lose some of your best workers because they
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don't feel they're being rewarded for their value and so you can see how this
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fluctuation changes dramatically and so by understanding social comparisons we can we can motivate people sometimes but
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we can also sort of undermine them incredibly well without without Our intention now in this book I mean it's a
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lot about accepting the inevitable of that you know we're going to make social
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comparisons we're probably going to be labeled or we're going to label other
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people or sometimes people are going to be deceptive in negotiations and sometimes we ourselves might be
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deceptive in negotiations so I mean when you're entering into a relationship with
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someone just as kind of a final question I mean are there certain sort of taking
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stock questions that you can ask when entering into a new relationship to kind of assess this and figure out what the
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dynamic is and how the dynamic might change and I mean I think you know the question that you're going to want to
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ask at the beginning of a relationship also in the middle you know it's like
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how do I find the right balance right between these forces how do I recognize what are the competitive forces and what
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are the Cooperative opportunities you know is one way to think about it and I love this one example that I that I've
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often taught in class a guy named John Clint Denon who got hired um right out of Harvard NBA at Xerox and he got a job
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that the person just below him had really wanted to get his name was Tom gunning you know he was gunning for that
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job right and John talks about how do I start off with this relationship right we're going to be co-workers you know
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anytime we walk into a job we're going like how am I going to preserve that right balance between these forces and
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he said the first thing I did is I didn't invite him for a first meeting into my office CU he's going to be
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thinking this should be my office right it's going to make him competitive I
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didn't invade his office maybe you know as another way of power play I found out
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what his favorite restaurant was and I invited him out to lunch to show a little thing and the first thing I said
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to him was like I need you and the reason why I need you is you know lots of people at Zer I'm new here right you
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can really help give me the lay of the land and you probably need me too right you didn't get the promotion that you
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wanted and maybe I can help you get the next promotion but then he you know to make sure that it's the right balance
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he's like and if you're not the person that can help me I can find someone else
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right so it wasn't just all hugs and kisses it was a little bit to like you know we're there's a there's a tension
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here and it's just a great example of saying we can work together but I'm not
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going to be exploited by you but I'm also not going to exploit you either you
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know and so just recognizing I think that example is a is a really great one well I think it's important yeah this
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idea of you know getting off on the right foot is exactly exactly right there we need to think about this
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balance and I think often it's you know start stting cooperatively but also you
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know recognizing that that tension in many relationships we often come to a place
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where we violated somebody's expectations so we can think about how to rebuild a relationship and and we
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talk about an example from uh Baptist Hospital in Florida where there was a tragic medical error uh there was a very
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young child who had uh who's breathing to had been disconnected uh during a scan and because of that error suffered
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severe brain damage now what's interesting about this case after this tragedy the hospital
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staff took actions to repair that relationship they were very candid they were quick they they apologized
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immediately and they took actions to change things at the hospital they ended up bringing this family
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in to become advocates for the h the hospital and the parents talked about how these changes were dramatic how
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they're committed to making sure this never happened again they ended up transforming what would be an adversary
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into an ally and there a couple of interesting things about this first there are specific steps that they
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followed to transform this relationship but second these steps had been instituted at a policy level from the
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head Administration so that is they had instituted steps to transform these relationships and they were informed by
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by research that is the the steps they followed um had a very predictable outcome and so I think there's a
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predictability to how we can transform our relationships to really transform foes into friends and find and find our
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balance yeah and and I think you know what Maurice said I think really captures um I think the the essence of
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the book whether it's you know the beginning of relationship whether it's
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in the middle of relationship just again asking your your yourself a couple questions one is have I found the right
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balance between cooperation competition um what do they need getting back to perspec taking but also what do I need
00:26:12
we're most successful when our needs are being met and your needs are being met
00:26:17
simultaneously um are there areas where I could be exploited right but are there
00:26:22
opportunities to make a connection and cooperation and so if we periodically ask ourselves that question
00:26:28
sometimes the beginning of the relationship sometime it's after a violation has occurred sometimes it's
00:26:33
just maybe we think the relationship is sort of you know not humming along as well as it could um it gives us those
00:26:39
opportunities and that's whether we're parent thinking about child or their
00:26:42
spouse thinking about our partner whether a friend thinking about a friend whether a colleague thinking about
00:26:47
another colleague a boss thinking of employee and vice versa asking ourselves these questions are just going to give
00:26:52
us so much more control so much more balance balance and they're going to make us so much more successful in
00:27:06
[Music] life