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Nice People Have Emptier Wallets

Are you an agreeable person—you know, a nice guy? If so, a logical follow-up might be: how are your finances? And here's why: "Agreeable peoplehave lower savings¹, they have higher debt, and they're also more likely to go bankrupt or default on their loans."

你是一个和蔼可亲的人——你知道吗，一个好人?如果是这样，一个合乎逻辑的后续问题可能是:你的财务状况如何?原因如下:“容易相处的人储蓄更少，债务更高，他们也更容易破产或拖欠贷款。”

Sandra Matz is a computational social scientist at the Columbia Business School in New York City. Using a combination of questionnaires and bank data, she and her colleague Joe Gladstone found that people who score as more agreeable on personality tests have a better chance of ending up in dire² financial straits—especially if they are low-income to begin with.

Sandra Matz是纽约市哥伦比亚商学院的计算社会科学家。通过结合调查问卷和银行数据，她和她的同事Joe Gladstone发现在性格测试中得分越高的人，更有可能陷入可怕的财务困境——尤其是如果他们一开始就是低收入者的话。

The researchers also combined personality data on millions of people in the US and the UK with regional data on how many people were unable to pay their debts. And they found, again, that the nicer a county or local area's people on average, the worse their finances. Matz thinks a factor could be that agreeable people just don't care much about money. Maybe they pick up the tab more often, or loan money when they can't afford to. They're generous to a fault.

研究人员还将美国和英国数百万人的性格数据，与地区数据相结合，分析了有多少人无法偿还债务。他们再次发现，一个县或当地居民的平均水平越高，他们的经济状况就越差。Matz认为，一个因素可能是随和的人不太在乎钱。也许他们会更频繁地付账，或者在他们付不起的时候借钱。他们太慷慨了。

So how do you get them to wise up?

"One way we could reframe this is saying, don't care about money just for yourself, but care about it for your family, care about it for the people you love. Because if you mismanage your money it's not just going to affect you, but it’s also going to affect all the people you care about, and that you love deeply." Which might translate agreeable people's superpower—caring about other people—into better financial sense. The results are in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology³. [Sandra C. Matz and Joe J. Gladstone, Nice Guys Finish Last: When and Why Agreeableness Is Associated With Economic Hardship]

那么，怎样才能让他们明白呢?

“我们可以重新定义这句话的一种方式是，不要只关心自己的钱，而是关心你的家人，关心你爱的人。”因为如果你管理不善，不仅会影响到你，还会影响到所有你关心的人，以及你深爱的人。这可能会把讨人喜欢的人的超能力——关心他人——转化为更好的财务意识。研究结果发表在《个性与社会心理学杂志》上。

If Matz does succeed in teaching nice people to be more stingy, who then will pick up the tab? "Then it's a matter of negotiating, then it should be more equally distributed. So if the agreeable person says I can't pay all the time, I only want to do that once in a while, but I also want you to give something back, because that's what makes a relationship a relationship, and not a one way street." Which might mean agreeable people need to get a little more comfortable having disagreeable conversations.

如果Matz成功地教会好人变得更小气，那么谁来买单呢?“然后这是一个谈判的问题，然后它应该更公平地分配。”所以，如果那个和蔼可亲的人说我不能一直付钱，我只是偶尔想这样做一次，但我也想让你回报一些东西，因为这是让一段关系成为一段关系的原因，而不是单向的。这可能意味着和蔼可亲的人在进行不愉快的谈话时需要变得更自在一些。