fixed pie.

When givers like Rifkin build networks, they expand the pie so that everyone can get a
larger slice. Nick Sullivan, an entrepreneur who has benefited from Rifkin’s help, says that “Adam
has the same effect on all of us: getting us to help people.” Rouf elaborates: “Adam always wants to
make sure that whoever he’s giving to is also giving to somebody else. If people benefit from his
advice, he makes sure they help other people he gives advice to—it’s creating a network, and making
sure that everybody in his network is helping each other, paying it forward.”
Cutting-edge research shows how Rifkin motivates other people to give. Giving, especially when
it’s distinctive and consistent, establishes a pattern that shifts other people’s reciprocity styles within
a group. It turns out that giving can be contagious. In one study, contagion experts James Fowler and
Nicholas Christakis found that giving spreads rapidly and widely across social networks. When one
person made the choice to contribute to a group at a personal cost over a series of rounds, other group
members were more likely to contribute in future rounds, even when interacting with people who
weren’t present for the original act. “This influence persists for multiple periods and spreads up to
three degrees of separation (from person to person to person to person),” Fowler and Christakis find,
such that “each additional contribution a subject makes . . . in the first period is tripled over the
course of the experiment by other subjects who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute
more as a consequence.”
When people walk into a new situation, they look to others for clues about appropriate behavior.
When giving starts to occur, it becomes the norm, and people carry it forward in interactions with
other people. To illustrate, imagine that you’re assigned to a group of four. The other three people are
strangers, and you’ll each make anonymous decisions, with no opportunity to communicate, during six
rounds. In each round, each of you will receive $3 and decide whether to take it for yourselves or
give it to the group. If you take it, you get the full $3. If you give it to the group, every group member
gets $2, including you. At the end of each round, you’ll find out what everyone decided. The group is
better off if everyone gives—each member would end up receiving $8 per round, for a maximum total
over six rounds of $48. But if you give and no one else does, you only get $12. This creates an
incentive to take, which will guarantee you $18.
Since you can’t communicate with one another, giving is a risky strategy. But in the actual study,
15 percent of the participants were consistent givers: they contributed to the group in all six rounds,
making a personal sacrifice for the benefit of the group. And it wasn’t as costly as you’d expect.
Surprisingly, the consistent givers still ended up doing well: they walked away with an average of 26
percent more money than participants from groups without a single consistent giver. How could they
give more and get more?
When the groups included one consistent giver, the other members contributed more. The presence
of a single giver was enough to establish a norm of giving. By giving, participants were able to make
their group members better off and managed to get more in the process. Even though they earned 50
percent less from each contribution, because they inspired others to give, they made a larger total sum
available to all participants. The givers raised the bar and expanded the pie for the whole group.
In this experiment, the consistent givers were doing the equivalent of a five-minute favor when
they contributed their money every round. They were making small sacrifices to benefit each member
of the group, and it inspired the group members to do the same. Through the five-minute favor, Rifkin
is expanding the pie for his whole network. In 106 Miles, the norm is for all five thousand
entrepreneurs to help one another. Rifkin explains that “you’re not doing somebody a favor because