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Research shows that it’s not terribly difficult for matchers and takers to develop this habit. Recall that the responsibility bias occurs because we have more information about our own contributions than others’. The key to balancing our responsibility judgments is to focus our attention on what others have contributed. All you need to do is make a list of what your partner contributes
before
you estimate your own contribution. Studies indicate that when employees think about how much help they receive from their bosses before thinking about how much they contribute to their bosses, their estimates of their bosses’ contributions double, from under 17 percent to over 33 percent. Bring together a work group of three to six people and ask each member to estimate the percentage of the total work that he or she does. Add up their estimates, and the average total is over 140 percent. Ask them to
reflect on each member’s contributions
before their own, and the average total drops to 123 percent.

Givers like Meyer do this naturally: they take care to
recognize what other people contribute
. In one study, psychologist Michael McCall asked people to fill out a survey measuring whether they were givers or takers, and to make decisions in pairs about the importance of different items for surviving in the desert. He randomly told half of the pairs that they failed and the other half that they succeeded. The takers blamed their partners for failures and claimed credit for successes. The givers shouldered the blame for failures and gave their partners more credit for successes.

This is George Meyer’s modus operandi: he’s incredibly tough on himself when things go badly, but quick to congratulate others when things go well. “Bad comedy hurts George physically,” Tim Long says. Meyer wants each joke to make people laugh—and many to make them think. Although he holds other people to the same high standards that he sets for himself, he’s more forgiving of their mistakes. Early in his career, Meyer was fired from a show called
Not Necessarily the News
after six weeks. Twenty years later, he ran into the boss who fired him. She apologized—firing him was clearly a mistake—and braced herself for Meyer to be angry. As he shared the story with me, Meyer laughed: “It was just lovely to see her again. I said ‘Come on, look where we are; all is forgiven.’ There are a few people in Hollywood who thrive on driving their enemies’ faces into the dirt. That’s such a hollow motivation. And you don’t want to have all these people out there trying to undermine you.”

In the
Simpsons
rewrite room, being more forgiving of others than of himself helped Meyer get the best ideas out of others. “I tried to create a climate in the room where everybody feels that they can contribute, that it’s okay to fall on your face many, many times,” he says. This is known as
psychological safety
—the belief that you can take a risk without being penalized or punished. Research by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson shows that in the type of psychologically safe environment that Meyer helped create, people learn and innovate more.
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And it’s givers who often create such an environment: in one study, engineers who shared ideas without expecting anything in return were more likely to play a
major role in innovation
, as they made it safe to exchange information. Don Payne recalls that when he and fellow writer John Frink joined
The Simpsons
, they were intimidated by the talented veterans on the show, but Meyer made it safe to present their ideas. “George was incredibly supportive, and took us under his wing. He made it very easy to join in and participate, encouraged us to pitch and didn’t denigrate us. He listened, and asked for our opinions.”

When revising scripts, many comedy writers cut material ruthlessly, leaving the people who wrote that material psychologically wounded. Meyer, on the other hand, says he “tried to specialize in the emotional support of other people.” When writers were freaking out about their scripts being rewritten, he was often the one to console them and calm them down. “I was always dealing with people in extremis; I would often talk people down from panic,” Meyer observes. “I got good at soothing them, and showing them a different way to look at the situation.” At the end of the day, even if he was trashing their work, they knew he cared about them as people. Carolyn Omine comments that “George does not mince words; he’ll come right out and tell you if he thinks the joke you pitched is dumb, but you never feel he’s saying you’re dumb.” Tim Long told me that when you give Meyer a script to read, “It’s as if you just handed him a baby, and it’s his responsibility to tell you if your baby’s sick. He really cares about great writing—and about you.”

If overcoming the responsibility bias gives us a clearer understanding of others’ contributions, what is it that allows us to offer support to colleagues in collaborations, where emotions can run high and people often take criticism personally? Sharing credit is only one piece of successful group work. Meyer’s related abilities to console fellow writers when their work was being cut, and to create a psychologically safe environment, are a hallmark of another important step that givers take in collaboration: seeing beyond the
perspective gap
.

In an experiment led by Northwestern University psychologist Loran Nordgren, people predicted how painful it would be to sit in a freezing room for five hours. They made their predictions under two different conditions: warm and cold. When the warm group estimated how much pain they would experience in the freezing room, they had an arm in a bucket of warm water. The cold group also made their judgments with an arm in a bucket, but it was filled with ice water. Which group would expect to feel the most pain in the freezing room?

As you probably guessed, it was the cold group. People anticipated that the freezing room would be 14 percent more painful when they had their arm in a bucket of ice water than a bucket of warm water. After literally feeling the cold for a minute, they knew several hours would be awful. But there was a third group of people who experienced cold under different circumstances. They stuck an arm in a bucket of ice water, but then took the arm out and filled out a separate questionnaire. After ten minutes had passed, they estimated how painful the freezing room would be.

Their predictions should have resembled the cold group’s, having felt the freezing temperature just ten minutes earlier, but they didn’t. They were identical to the warm group. Even though they had felt the cold ten minutes earlier, once they weren’t cold anymore, they could no longer imagine it. This is a
perspective gap
: when we’re not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state, we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us. For instance, evidence shows that physicians consistently think their patients are feeling less pain than they actually are. Without being in a state of pain themselves, physicians can’t fully realize what it’s like to be in that state.

In a
San Francisco hospital
, a respected oncologist was concerned about a patient. “He’s not as mentally clear as he was yesterday.” The patient was old, and he had advanced metastatic cancer. The oncologist decided to order a spinal tap to see what was wrong, in the hopes of prolonging the patient’s life. “Maybe he has an infection—meningitis, a brain abscess—something treatable.”

The neurologist on call, Robert Burton, had his doubts. The patient’s prognosis was grim, and the spinal tap would be extremely painful. But the oncologist was not ready to throw in the towel. When Burton entered the room with the spinal tap tray, the patient’s family protested. “Please, no more,” they said together. The patient—too frail to speak from a terminal illness—nodded, declining the spinal tap. Burton paged the oncologist and explained the family’s wishes to avoid the spinal tap, but the oncologist was not ready to give up. Finally, the patient’s wife grabbed Burton’s arm, begging him for support in refusing the oncologist’s plan to do the spinal tap. “It’s not what we want,” the wife pleaded. The oncologist was still determined to save the patient. He explained why the spinal tap was essential, and eventually, the family and patient gave in.

Burton performed the spinal tap, which was challenging to carry out and quite painful for the patient. The patient developed a pounding headache, fell into a coma and died three days later due to the cancer. Although the oncologist was a prominent expert in his field, Burton remembers him “mainly for what he taught me about uncritical acceptance of believing that you ‘are doing good.’ The only way you can really know is if you ask the patient and you have a dialogue.”

In collaborations, takers rarely cross this perspective gap. They’re so focused on their own viewpoints that they never end up seeing how others are reacting to their ideas and feedback. On the other hand, researcher Jim Berry and I discovered that in creative work, givers are motivated to benefit others, so they find ways to
put themselves in other people’s shoes
. When George Meyer was editing the work of
Simpsons
animators and writers, he was facing a perspective gap. He was cutting their favorite scenes and jokes, not his own. Recognizing that he couldn’t literally feel what they were feeling, he found a close substitute: he reflected on what it felt like to receive feedback and have his work revised when he was in their positions.

When he joined
The Simpsons
in 1989, Meyer had written a Thanksgiving episode that included a dream sequence. He thought the sequence was hilarious, but Sam Simon, the show runner at the time, didn’t agree. When Simon cut the dream from the script, Meyer was furious. “I flipped out. I was so enraged that Sam had to send me to do another task, just to get me out of the room.” When criticizing and changing the work of animators and writers, Meyer would look back on this experience. “I could relate to that sense of being eviscerated when other people were rewriting their stuff,” he told me. This made him more empathetic and considerate, helping other people to simmer down from intense states and accept his revisions.

Like Meyer, successful givers shift their frames of reference to the recipient’s perspective. For most people, this isn’t the natural starting point. Consider the common dilemma of giving a gift for a wedding or a new baby’s arrival. When the recipient has created a registry, do you pick something from the registry or send a unique gift?

One evening, my wife was searching for a wedding gift for some friends. She decided it was more thoughtful and considerate to find something that wasn’t on their registry, and chose to send candlesticks, assuming that our friends would appreciate the unique gift. Personally, I was perplexed. Several years earlier, when we received wedding gifts, my wife was often disappointed when people sent unique gifts, rather than choosing items from our registry. She knew she wanted particular items, and it was quite rare for anyone to send a gift that she preferred over the ones she had actually selected. Knowing that she preferred the registry gift when she was the recipient, why did she opt for a unique gift when she was in the giving role?

To get to the bottom of this puzzle, researchers Francesca Gino of Harvard and Frank Flynn of Stanford examined how senders and receivers react to
registry gifts and unique gifts
. They found that senders consistently underestimated how much recipients appreciated registry gifts. In one experiment, they recruited ninety people to either give or receive a gift from Amazon.com. The receivers had twenty-four hours to create a wish list of ten products in the price range of twenty to thirty dollars. The senders accessed the wish lists and were randomly assigned to either choose a registry gift (from the list) or a unique gift (an idea of their own).

The senders expected that the recipients would appreciate the unique gift as somewhat more thoughtful and personal. In fact, the opposite was true. The recipients reported significantly greater appreciation of the registry gifts than the unique gifts. The same patterns emerged with friends giving and receiving wedding gifts and birthday gifts. The senders preferred to give unique gifts, but the recipients actually preferred the gifts they solicited on their registries and wish lists.

Why? Research shows that when we take others’ perspectives, we
tend to stay within our own frames of reference
, asking “How would
I
feel in this situation?” When we’re giving a gift, we imagine the joy that we would experience in receiving the gifts that we’re selecting. But this isn’t the same joy that the recipient will experience, because the recipient has a different set of preferences. In the giver’s role, my wife loved the candlesticks she picked out. But if our friends were enamored with those candlesticks, they would have put them on their gift registry.
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To effectively help colleagues, people need to step outside their own frames of reference. As George Meyer did, they need to ask, “How will
the recipient
feel in this situation?” This capacity to see the world from another person’s perspective develops very early in life. In one experiment, Berkeley psychologists Betty Repacholi and Alison Gopnik studied fourteen-month-old and eighteen-month-old toddlers. The toddlers had two bowls of food in front of them: one with goldfish crackers and one with broccoli. The toddlers tasted food from both bowls, showing a strong preference for
goldfish crackers over broccoli
. Then, they watched a researcher express disgust while tasting the crackers and delight while tasting the broccoli. When the researcher held out her hand and asked for some food, the toddlers had a chance to offer either the crackers or the broccoli to the researcher. Would they travel outside their own perspectives and give her the broccoli, even though they themselves hated it?

The fourteen-month-olds didn’t, but the eighteen-month-olds did. At fourteen months, 87 percent shared the goldfish crackers instead of the broccoli. By eighteen months, only 31 percent made this mistake while 69 percent had learned to share what others liked, even if it differed from what they liked. This ability to imagine other people’s perspectives, rather than getting stuck in our own perspectives, is a signature skill of successful givers in collaborations.
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Interestingly, when George Meyer first started his career as a comedy writer, he didn’t use his perspective-taking skills in the service of helping his colleagues. He saw his fellow writers as rivals: