Born To Be Good: The Jen Ratio

I used to be a claim adjuster. Now I just play one on TV.

Well, it’s not really TV—it’s a classroom, and instead of handling claims myself, I teach adjusters and adjusters-wannabe how to handle them. And while what I teach them about laminate floors and drywall repairs and not falling off a roof are very important things (especially, mind you, that last one), it might be true the most important thing I teach them is how to treat the policyholder they are taking care of.

I tell them that we can teach them how to interpret a policy contract, and I can teach them how to manage their caseload. I tell them that managers will be patient with them, to a point, if their estimates have errors, as long as they are open to critique and fix it on the next one. But I tell them that the thing that will get them sent home before they’ve had a chance to even recoup their travel expenses if they get deployed to work a catastrophe is if the policyholders are complaining about being treated poorly. If they’re being boorish or chronically late or generally unkempt.

I can teach you the technical skills, I tell them. But I cannot fix your personality. (For that, we have to settle for learning strategies to compensate.)

There’s something else that I tell them about that. We treat the customer well—we do the right thing—because we are good people, I say. But if we can’t do that because, as it turns out, we are not good people, then we do the right thing because it will make our own lives better.

For example: The right thing to do is to return a phone call promptly. That’s treating a customer well. And I would think we could do that just because we’re good people. But even if we’re not—good people, I mean—our day will go better if we return that call. If we don’t? The customer is going to call back, and they’ll be a little less patient, maybe a little more angry than they would have been. If we keep on not returning that call, the customer is going to call our manager. And now the customer and the manager are a little less patient and a little more angry than they were before. And we’ve had to spend more time listening to voice messages we wouldn’t have had to get.

It’s good to do the right thing. I might not give two little hoots about what that policyholder wants (shame on me). But if I take care of him, right now, I’m going to have a much better day.

Economists have studied for quite some time the “core motive of human action.” To what degree, they wonder, do we act out of pure self-interest? Dacher Keltner suggests in Born to Be Good that “clearly we are wired to pursue self-interest, to compete, to be vigilant to the bad. Those tendencies make evolutionary sense, they are built into our genes and nervous systems.” But Keltner goes on to observe that developing schools of thought point to a pattern in our lives that is “punctuated by actions that harm our self-interest while enhancing the welfare of others: generosity toward co-workers, acts of charity to faraway children and the protection of other species, buying Girl Scout cookies at exorbitant prices.” (I must argue here, however, that never in the history of humankind has the purchase of Girl Scout cookies harmed anyone’s self-interest.)

Keltner’s research confirms that despite an increased focus in monetary gain as a primary motive for various undertakings in our lives, that we don’t always act in a manner consistent with our own self-interest.

Or, really, do we? Is it possible, in some way, that things we do for the good of another that would seem to be a detriment to our own self-interest are actually good for us after all? Keltner introduces the concept of a jen ratio, which is a mathematical equation that reflects the “balance of good and bad in your life.”

In the jen ratio’s denominator? “Recent actions in which someone has brought the bad in others to completion.” That can be the sales clerk being rude, the boss telling you you’re fired, the policyholder yelling at you on the phone.

But the numerator (that’s the top number in the fraction) is a tally of “the actions that bring the good in others to completion.” The man who generously tips the server at the restaurant, the stranger who picks up the book a woman dropped on the sidewalk and slips it back into her hands, the child who picks flowers from the garden for her mother.

Think about the kind of day a person could have when the good brought to completion outweighs the bad. When the jen ratio looks like 5:3 in favor of the things that make us more human. “As the value of your jen ratio rises,” Keltner says, “so too does the humanity of your world.”

Claims work can sometimes feel devoid of humanity. And folks who are contending with blown-off roofs or wet walls and carpets often have difficulty finding the human side of their encounters with their claim adjuster. In the next class I teach, along with the formulas for the area of a trapezoid, I’m going to be talking to my students about their jen ratios and how they might enhance the “millisecond manifestations of human goodness.”

***

We’re discussing Born To Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life in our book club this month. Are you reading along? What do you think of the jen ratio? Is it a valid reflection of our efforts to stay “human”? What good have you brought to completion in another today? (Is it time to work on your ratio?)

Share your thoughts in the comments, and join us again next week as we continue our conversation.

Our reading schedule:

Announcement Post
January 10: Chapters 1-4: Jen Science, Darwin’s Joys, Rational Irrationality & Survival of the Kindest
January 17: Chapters 5-8: Embarrassment, Smile, Laughter, Tease
January 24: Chapters 9-12: Touch, Love, Compassion, Awe

Buy Born to Be Good

Photo by Angelo Amboldi, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by LW Lindquist.

• Author
• Recent Posts

Will Willingham

Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

Latest posts by Will Willingham (see all)

• Earth Song Poem Featured on The Slowdown!—Birds in Home Depot - February 7, 2023
• The Rapping in the Attic—Happy Holidays Fun Video! - December 21, 2022
• Video: Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience—Enchanting! - December 6, 2022