How to Make the World a Little Nicer

The key to peace, love, and understanding is ... understanding!

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

One quirky thing that comes up over and over again in the personality-change research is that 1) not very many people want to change their level of the trait agreeableness and 2) those who do want to change on that trait find it hard to do so.

Agreeableness is the personality trait that represents, basically, niceness. The agreeable are people-people: They get along with others, and they’re modest and compassionate. Therein lies the problem: Mean people don’t see the point of being nice, and they also have no idea how to become nicer. People who want to be more extroverted can go to more parties and events, but no kumbaya convention will suddenly make you into less of an asshole.

In one study, for instance, the psychologist Nathan Hudson measured college students’ levels of the “dark triad”—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy—all of which are loosely related to low agreeableness. He found that, on average, the students who were high on those three traits didn’t seem to want to change. In fact, compared to other participants, those who were high in Machiavellianism were more likely to want to increase in that trait. (Granted, this could be because some of the questions that measured the dark triad traits, like asking if you’re a “natural leader,” could be interpreted positively, especially by American college students.)

Still, we see evidence that people can become more agreeable, even if they don’t realize they’re doing so.

In that same study, Hudson then asked his student-participants if they wanted to change any of their personality traits. Surprisingly, many of the students who were high in the dark triad voluntarily selected into changing on agreeableness. In other words, they didn’t see their dark, disagreeable traits as a problem, but they did want to become more compassionate and soft-hearted—i.e. agreeable. It seemed like they wanted to improve their social relationships, not realizing that their narcissism and psychopathy might be a hindrance to that goal.

These college Machiavellis then attempted some exercises that were supposed to increase their agreeableness: They did nice things for friends and strangers. They tried to take the perspective of other people. That sort of thing.

A surprising thing happened. After they completed the agreeableness challenges, the participants became more agreeable, and they also decreased in all three “dark triad” traits—even though they hadn’t been especially interested in doing so.

This illustrates how sometimes, you can change your personality without really meaning to. You don’t have to be particularly aware that you’re trying to be a better person. It can kind of just sneak up on you!

And when it comes to increasing on agreeableness, one thing seems particularly effective: Helping people understand what others are going through. Over and over again, something I noticed in the social-science research is that when people did manage to become more agreeable, it was by putting themselves in the shoes of their enemies. Though it’s still hard to increase agreeableness, this is one of the few strategies that seems to work.

A recent study illustrates this phenomenon well. In 2019, the German economist Matthias Sutter and his co-authors selected 20 different Turkish companies for an experiment in agreeableness: At ten of the companies, workers would be trained to be nicer to each other. The other ten companies would serve as controls, but would get the niceness intervention later, after the study was completed.

When Sutter and his colleagues first surveyed the 20 firms’ employees, he noticed that about 10 percent of them said they had no one to turn to for advice at work. “And this is frightening, because it means if someone runs into a problem, he or she doesn't even ask anybody for help,” Sutter told me. He also found that the employees who felt unsatisfied at work were mostly unhappy about one thing: They felt their coworkers didn’t understand them.

Sutter and his colleagues then put the employees through a variety of workshops led by corporate trainers. Some of the workshops had the participants play theater games; others taught them more positive communication. (The material covered things like “choose your language carefully, and be positive … I mean, all of the things that you can easily imagine,” Sutter told me. “But strangely enough, it's not bad to make this explicit.”) Other workshops focused on resolving obstacles to achieving a better workplace, and some asked the employees to imagine themselves in the shoes of others—whether executives, customers, or employees of a different gender. The workers created projects aimed at promoting better social interaction at work that they presented to C-level executives. Altogether, the intervention workshops took about 20 hours total.

Sutter and his colleagues didn’t measure the trait of agreeableness exactly, but the results they found look an awful lot like an increase in agreeableness. Several months later, the employees who went through the training reported higher workplace satisfaction and more collegial behavior in their departments. In a game designed to test their antisocial tendencies, they were less likely to sabotage their colleagues’ performance than the controls were. They were less likely to feel out of touch with their leaders, or to quit their jobs. They saw their bosses as more professional and empathetic. And that sad chunk of employees who had no one to turn to for help? It was cut roughly in half. “It means the people talked more to each other, and are helping each other and not working against each other,” Sutter said.

It’s hard to say what, exactly, about these workshops was so effective, but Sutter believes it was that several of them required workers to imagine the lives of colleagues from different departments and of different seniority levels. Those who felt misunderstood learned to understand others, and knew that others were learning to understand them, too. “Trying to see the workplace demands with the eyes of someone else,” Sutter says, is what made the difference.

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I like this study for the somewhat selfish reason that it vindicates the role of the media. Our whole job is to help people understand the perspectives of other people, especially people you might not have encountered or agreed with previously.

But also, it shows how, sometimes, the root of dislike is actually misunderstanding. Not in a euphemistic, “this is all just a big misunderstanding” sense, but in the deeply true yet deeply frustrating sense that it’s impossible for a human to fully inhabit the mind of another human.

When you don’t know what’s in someone else’s head, you assume it’s all darkness and evil, a twisted version of your own reality. It seems the best way to increase agreeableness—niceness, compassion, what have you—is to show that it’s not that different from your perspective after all.