The Profound Niceness of Mr. Rogers – Do Nice Guys Really Finish Last?

It was hard to make Mr. Rogers Matt mad. His composure and his cool were always present. This feature was essentially part of his DNA, and it calmed the world around him. He was so nice to everyone all the time that there are literally hundreds of stories online about his saint-like deeds, which is why it's strange that what made Mr. Rogers really angry were pies in the face.

I don't mean that as hyperbole either. Mr. Rogers wasn't talking about verbal or political pies in the face, making someone look foolish on camera. I mean literal TV clowns throwing pies at each other. One of the gentlest, goofiest forms of slapstick comedy made Mr. Rogers furious.

During an interview with Amy Hollinsworth, Mr. Rogers, the nicest man on earth said, “I got into television because I saw people throwing pies at each other's faces, and that to me was such demeaning behavior. And if there's anything that bothers me, it's one person demeaning another. That really makes me mad.” The man who dominated children's television for 33 years hated television. He hated how it betrayed people, driving them to demean each other. He thought TV was loud, crude, and frantic.

This is ironic because Mr. Rogers won three daytime Emmy awards for television, and he won the Television Critics Association Lifetime award. This award is usually given to prominent, loud personalities like Lucille Ball and Johnny Carson. When Mr. Rogers won, he stood for his acceptance speech and asked for 10 seconds of complete uninterrupted silence.

From a crowd of daytime TV stars and producers whose job it is to be loud for a living, he wanted 10 seconds of quiet consideration from everyone. For all the people have cared for us in our lives and loved us into being. You can see him on YouTube, pulling up his sleeve to look at his wristwatch. He said, "I'll watch the time in complete earnestness and utter confidence." You can hear the crowd chuckle at first, but the chuckles died down, and Mr. Rogers got his 10 seconds. He brought television as a whole to a hushed, respectful silence. Because Mr. Rogers was nice through and through, and sometimes nice guys finish first.

Have you heard of the idea of nice guys faking it? For today, when we talk about being nice, we don't mean guys who pretend to be nice so that they can try to get a date or get laid and act surprised or aggressive when the other person doesn’t reciprocate. We're talking about genuine, sincere people. The ones who are nice without the desire to get a reward from it. However, does it really pay to be nice?

Myth 1: Nice people get treated as doormats, right? So why the heck did being nice stick around in our species? If aggressive people are seen as more attractive, shouldn't the world be filled with Biff, the bully people from Back to the Future?

Starting out with a fun fact, Mr. Rogers used to get fan mail from all over the world, and he had about 13 million kids watching this show. And the best part is that Mr. Rogers wrote all of his fans back. He'd right-hand letters to each of the kids, making them feel special. How many TV stars today would handwrite anything to anyone? If anyone's wondering how long that takes, instead of using autocorrect on your phone or typewriter, just write a single letter and try not to go mad.

Now, as nice as this might be, most today generally contribute being nice as being walked on. Why? Maybe because people clump together somebody being needy, weak, predictable, boring, or inexperienced and lump that in with niceness. There's actually a prevalent book for Millennial self-help, which is called No More Mr. Nice guy, and the idea is that being nice gets you walked on. This idea is sort of something we've all adopted as necessary.

For this part, we are explicitly talking about how humans evolved to be nice, not doormat nice, but patient, altruistic, and helpful to each other. After reading articles, I've started to drift into thinking we're built to be nice. We've talked about this before in earlier podcast episodes, but there's something called Williams Beuren Syndrome. They look softer, like a dog compared to a wolf. Now, if you look at our earlier ancestors, early man, or Neanderthals, that's the wolf version of us. Just on the human timeline, we are domesticated. We are built to be nice to some degree. Another good indicator of this is if you put enough chimps or chimpanzees in an airplane and fly them somewhere, it's not going to land with an airplane full of chimps. It's going to land with a plane full of bodies and maybe one champ. If you can put a bunch of humans together, we are usually perfectly fine.

So, if you ever wonder if we are born to be nice and if the Self-Domestication theory holds water, it really does. We could lock ourselves away with each other and be fine. Now, a lot of this also has to with our choices, like our mate selection throughout history. We usually gravitated toward more social and socially conscious mates because we are hardwired to strive for quality resources to help us survive and make us comfortable. The better you are at gaining resources, the better you are socially. In a sense, it wouldn't make sense for everybody to be a wolf. It makes more sense for us to be puppy dogs and sort of all get along with each other.

Myth 2: Speaking of our attraction to dominate people, how unattractive is niceness? Is it unattractive at all? Can being nice, in earnest, help score you a date?

I want to get a little bit into the practicality of being nice. Many people believe that being nice makes you seem less attractive when you first meet people. It's like those 80s movies where the girl goes with the jock, and the sweet, nice kid is always trying to win her over.

So, does being nice make you un-dateable? First off, we will address the elephant in the room. Yes, being nice makes it look like you are trying to overcome a low number. If you are nice in text or in your dating life, trying to overcome feeling inadequate against the person you're hitting on, that's not altruistic nice. That's nice because you are trying to raise the esteem of somebody else. However, being truly nice, treating everyone with respect can make you attractive and noticed.

I'm going to use a Psychology Today quote to define this a little bit: “It's if nice really meant weakened boring, then guys wouldn't be attractive.” And the nice definition in general, caring and being sensitive about others holds great appeal. I found a study done in 2003 by Urbaniak and Kilmann, and they used fake online dating profiles. They depicted versions of the same "Todd." They made a nice Todd, a neutral Todd, and a jerky Todd. These profiles were completely identical, except for subtle suggestions of qualities of niceness. And women selected the nice Todd as someone to date twice as often as the neutral one and 8X more frequently than the jerk Todd. As for attractiveness, they found jerk Todd more attractive, as he was better-looking even though he was mean, but nice Todd was more dateable. Overall, women are slightly more attracted to the jerks, but they don't pick them for long-term dating or marriage.

We also talked about a study in a later episode where women would smile or not smile at the end of a bar and look to see how long a man would stare back at them. They found that women who were smiling got more looks and numbers because they looked like someone who was nice and friendly. In fact, they were seven times more likely to be approached and given a number. So, does niceness pay off? It looks like, for men, it pays off in the long run, and for women, it pays off pretty much immediately if you appear nice in the moment.

Myth 3: The ultimate expression of niceness altruism means giving away your time and money, which can't be good for your bank account. So, we'll ask the big question; do nice people make more money in the end?

Money is our third discussion point; does being nice make you more money in the end? Do you feel like you've been walked on to where it costs you? Because you're nice, it might mean you give more than you receive.

This comes from The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and they analyzed four really big data sets. Two of which included tracking individuals and their families over several years. A data set from a UK household study looked at how people responded with altruistic behavior. When we say altruism, we mean people who are genuinely giving with time and money. The measure was purely on how much they gave to charity how much time they volunteered. They found that people who showed greater altruism in these studies had a greater number of children throughout their lifetime. They had more income, and they had more personal interactions. A similar study was done in America and Britain, and both showed the same thing.

The altruistic people who were seen as having more kids and having a higher income. One of the studies actually looked into if these people were more fertile. However, that does not seem to be the case. One of the scientists noted that selfish people may tend to have lower-quality relationships that they're too busy being distracted by themselves. And so, they have fewer opportunities to have children.

In the end, talking money-wise, nice guys and gals tend to finish first. They tend to have more significant incomes, more kids, and more opportunities.

Final Thoughts

Today we wanted to explore the myth as a whole that nice guys, true nice guys, finish last. And they do finish, last but only in a very narrow spectrum of dating, when they might appear weak, needy, or boring to a potential fling. But being nice, practicing social consciousness, and being cooperative has put our species on top of the world and in space. There's a reason why chimps can't come together to build a rocket ship. They lack, well, the niceness for that kind of coordination.

Nice Todd might be perceived as less aggressive, less sexually active, and less attractive. However, nice Todd is also seen as more intelligent and better marriage material. Even better than insensitive Todd, who comes off as more attractive, if you can believe that.

Finally, being callous and cynical may help you retain wealth in the financial world, but if you value family, children, and a high-income stream, then altruistic people definitely win big in the end.

In a world that feels like it is trying to take advantage of us, being nice might seem like a weakness. But trust me and trust the science; being nice is human nature. Perhaps the best part of our nature. And if people laugh at you for being a doormat, remember, the nicest man on earth made a theater full of chuckling people go silent just by holding up his wristwatch.