Being the nice guy doesn’t pay off well
ARE you highly co-operative and generous at your workplace? Well, it does not pay to be a do-gooder always. In a competitive circumstances, it can attract hatred and social punishment, researchers said.
It was found that co-operative behaviour attracted punishment most often in groups whose members compete with each other. However, if there was no competition, co-operation increased, the study, published in the journal Psychological Science, showed.
“Most of the time we like the co-operators, the good guys. We like it when the bad guys get their comeuppance, and when non-co-operators are punished,” said Professor Pat Barclay, of the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada.
“People will hate on the really good guys. This pattern has been found in every culture in which it has been looked at,” Barclay added. Some people like to bring co-operators down a peg, especially if they think the good guys make them look bad.
According to the researchers, being suspicious, jealous or hostile toward those who seem better or nicer or holier than us appears to run deep in the psychological make-up of humans. Anthropological evidence from egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies suggests a similar social phenomenon prevented excellent hunters from dominating the group.
“You can imagine within an organisation today the attitude, ‘Hey, you’re working too hard and making the rest of us look bad.’ In some organisations people police how hard others work, to make sure no-one is raising the bar from what is expected,” Barclay said. – IANS