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By giving away credit, Meyer compromised his visibility. “For a long time, George’s towering contribution to what some see as the most important TV show of the period was not as well known as it should have been,” Long recalls. “He was generating a tremendous amount of material, and not really getting credit.” Should Meyer have claimed more credit for his efforts? Hogging credit certainly seemed to work for Frank Lloyd Wright: at Taliesin, Wright insisted that his name be on every document as head architect, even when apprentices took the lead on a project. He threatened his apprentices that if they didn’t credit him first and submit all documents for his approval, he would accuse them of forgery and take them to court.

Yet if we take a closer look at Meyer’s experience, we might draw the conclusion that when Wright had success as an architect, it was in spite of taking credit—not because of it. Meyer’s reluctance to take credit might have cost him some fame in the short run, but he wasn’t worried about it. He earned credit as an executive producer, landing a half dozen Emmys for his work on
The Simpsons
, and felt there was plenty of credit to go around.
“A lot of people feel they’re diminished if there are too many names on a script, like everybody’s trying to share a dog bowl,” Meyer says. “But that’s not really the way it works. The thing about credit is that it’s not zero-sum. There’s room for everybody, and you’ll shine if other people are shining.”

Time would prove Meyer right. Despite his short-term sacrifices, Meyer ended up receiving the credit he deserved. Meyer was virtually unknown outside Hollywood until 2000, when David Owen published his profile in the
New Yorker
, with the headline describing Meyer as “the funniest man behind the funniest show on TV.” When Owen contacted key
Simpsons
writers for interviews, they jumped at the chance to sing Meyer’s praises. As Tim Long puts it, “It makes me incredibly happy to extol George’s virtues, even if I’m going to embarrass him.”

Just as matchers grant a bonus to givers in collaborations, they impose a tax on takers. In a
study of Slovenian companies
led by Matej Cerne, employees who hid knowledge from their coworkers struggled to generate creative ideas because their coworkers responded in kind, refusing to share information with them. To illustrate, consider the career of the medical researcher
Jonas Salk
, who began working to develop a polio vaccine in 1948. The following year, scientists John Enders, Frederick Robbins, and Thomas Weller successfully grew the polio virus in test tubes, paving the way for mass-producing a vaccine based on a live virus. By 1952, Salk’s research lab at the University of Pittsburgh had developed a vaccine that appeared to be effective. That year witnessed the worst polio epidemic in U.S. history. The virus infected more than 57,000 people, leading to more than 3,000 deaths and 20,000 cases of paralysis. Over the next three years, Salk’s mentor, Thomas Francis, directed the evaluation of a field trial of the Salk vaccine, testing it on more than 1.8 million children with the help of 220,000 volunteers, 64,000 school workers, and 20,000 health care professionals. On April 12, 1955, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Francis made an announcement that sent a ripple of hope throughout the country: the Salk vaccine was “safe, effective and potent.” Within two years, the vaccine was disseminated through the herculean efforts of the March of Dimes, and the incidence of polio fell by nearly 90 percent. By 1961, there were just 161 cases in the United States. The vaccine had similar effects worldwide.

Jonas Salk became an international hero. But at the historic 1955 press conference, Salk gave a valedictory speech that jeopardized his relationships and his reputation in the scientific community. He didn’t acknowledge the important contributions of Enders, Robbins, and Weller, who had won a Nobel Prize a year earlier for their groundbreaking work that enabled Salk’s team to produce the vaccine. Even more disconcertingly, Salk gave no credit to the six researchers in his lab who were major contributors to his efforts to develop the vaccine—Byron Bennett, Percival Bazeley, L. James Lewis, Julius Youngner, Elsie Ward, and Francis Yurochko.

Salk’s team left the press conference in tears. As historian David Oshinsky writes in
Polio: An American Story
, Salk never acknowledged “the people in his own lab. This group, seated proudly together in the packed auditorium, would feel painfully snubbed. . . . Salk’s coworkers from Pittsburgh . . . had come expecting to be honored by their boss. A tribute seemed essential, and long overdue.” This was especially true from a matcher’s perspective. One colleague told a reporter, “At the beginning, I saw him as a father figure. And at the end, an
evil father figure
.”

Over time, it became clear that Julius Youngner felt particularly slighted. “Everybody likes to get credit for what they’ve done,” Youngner told Oshinsky. “It was a big shock.” The snub fractured their relationship: Youngner left Salk’s lab in 1957 and went on to make a number of important contributions to virology and immunology. In 1993, they finally crossed paths at the University of Pittsburgh, and Youngner shared his feelings. “We were in the audience, your closest colleagues and devoted associates, who worked hard and faithfully for the same goal that you desired,” Youngner began. “Do you remember whom you mentioned and whom you left out? Do you realize how devastated we were at that moment and ever afterward when you persisted in making your coworkers invisible?” Youngner reflected that Salk “was clearly shaken by these memories and offered little response.”

Jonas Salk’s moment of taking sole credit haunted him for the rest of his career. He launched the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where hundreds of researchers continue to push the envelope of humanitarian science today. But Salk’s own productivity waned—later in his career, he tried unsuccessfully to develop an AIDS vaccine—and he was shunned by his colleagues. He never won a Nobel Prize, and he was never elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.
*
“In the coming years, almost every prominent polio researcher would gain entrance,” Oshinsky writes. “The main exception, of course, was Jonas Salk. . . . As one observer put it, Salk had broken the ‘unwritten commandments’ of scientific research,” which included “Thou shalt give credit to others.” According to Youngner, “People really held it against him that he had grandstanded like that and really done the most un-collegial thing that you can imagine.”

Salk thought his colleagues were jealous. “If someone does something and gets credit for it, then there is this tendency to have this competitive response,” he acknowledged in
rare comments about the incident
. “I was not unscathed by Ann Arbor.” But Salk passed away in 1995 without ever acknowledging the contributions of his colleagues. Ten years later, in 2005, the University of Pittsburgh held an event to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the vaccine announcement. With Youngner in attendance, Salk’s son, AIDS researcher
Peter Salk
, finally set the record straight. “It was not the accomplishment of one man. It was the accomplishment of a dedicated and skilled team,” Peter Salk said. “This was a collaborative effort.”

It appears that Jonas Salk made the same mistake as Frank Lloyd Wright: he saw himself as independent rather than interdependent. Instead of earning the idiosyncrasy credits that George Meyer attained, Salk was penalized by his colleagues for taking sole credit.

Why didn’t Salk ever credit the contributions of his colleagues to the development of the polio vaccine? It’s possible that he was jealously guarding his own accomplishments, as a taker would naturally do, but I believe there’s a more convincing answer: he didn’t feel they deserved credit. Why would that be?

To understand this puzzle, we need to take a trip to Canada, where psychologists have been asking married couples to put their relationships on the line. Think about your marriage, or your most recent romantic relationship. Of the total effort that goes into the relationship, from making dinner and planning dates to taking out the garbage and resolving conflicts, what percentage of the work do you handle?

Let’s say you claim responsibility for 55 percent of the total effort in the relationship. If you’re perfectly calibrated, your partner will claim responsibility for 45 percent, and your estimates will add up to 100 percent. In actuality, psychologists Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly found that three out of every four couples add up to significantly more than 100 percent. Partners overestimate their own contributions. This is known as the
responsibility bias
: exaggerating our own contributions relative to others’ inputs. It’s a mistake to which takers are especially vulnerable, and it’s partially driven by the desire to see and present ourselves positively. In line with this idea, Jonas Salk certainly didn’t avoid the spotlight. “One of his great gifts,” Oshinsky writes, “was a knack for putting himself forward in a manner that made him seem genuinely indifferent to his fame. . . . Reporters and photographers would always find Salk grudging but available. He would warn them not to waste too much of his time; he would grouse about the important work they were keeping him from doing; and then, having lodged his formulaic protest, he would fully accommodate.”

But there’s another factor at play that’s both more powerful and more flattering: information discrepancy. We have more access to information about our own contributions than the contributions of others. We see all of our own efforts, but we only witness a subset of our partners’ efforts. When we think about who deserves the credit, we have more knowledge of our own contributions. Indeed, when asked to list each spouse’s specific contributions to their marriage, on average, people were able to come up with eleven of their own contributions, but only eight of their partners’ contributions.

When Salk claimed sole credit for the polio vaccine, he had vivid memories of the blood, sweat, and tears that he invested in developing the vaccine, but comparatively little information about his colleagues’ contributions. He literally hadn’t experienced what Youngner and the rest of the team did—and he wasn’t present for the Nobel Prize–winning discovery that Enders, Robbins, and Weller made.

“Even when people are well intentioned,” writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, “they tend to overvalue their own contributions and undervalue those of others.” This responsibility bias is a major source of failed collaborations. Professional relationships disintegrate when entrepreneurs, inventors, investors, and executives feel that their partners are not giving them the credit they deserve, or doing their fair share.

In Hollywood, between 1993 and 1997 alone, more than four hundred screenplays—roughly a third of all submitted—went to credit arbitration. If you’re a taker, your driving motivation is to make sure you get more than you give, which means you’re carefully counting every contribution that you make. It’s all too easy to believe that you’ve done the lion’s share of the work, overlooking what your colleagues contribute.

George Meyer was able to overcome the responsibility bias.
The Simpsons
has contributed many words to the English lexicon, the most famous being Homer’s
d’oh
! response to an event that causes mental or physical anguish. Meyer didn’t invent that word, but he did coin
yoink
, the familiar phrase that
Simpsons
characters utter when they snatch an item from another character’s hands. In 2007, the humor magazine
Cracked
ran a feature on the
top words
created by
The Simpsons
. Making the list were classics like
cromulent
(describing something that’s fine, acceptable, or illegitimately legitimate) and
tomacco
(a crossbreed of tomato and tobacco made by Homer, first suggested in a 1959
Scientific American
piece, and actually crossbred in 2003 by a
Simpsons
fan named Rob Bauer). But the top invented word on the list was
meh
, the expression of pure indifference that debuted in the sixth season of the show. In one episode, Marge Simpson is fascinated by a weaving loom at a Renaissance Fair, having studied weaving in high school. She weaves a message: “Hi Bart, I am weaving on a loom.” Bart’s response: “meh.” Six years later, an episode aired in which Lisa Simpson actually spells out the word.

Meh
has appeared in numerous dictionaries, from Macmillan (“used for showing that you do not care what happens or that you are not particularly interested in something”) to Dictionary.com (“an expression of boredom or apathy”) to
Collins English Dictionary
(“an interjection to suggest indifference or boredom—or as an adjective to say something is mediocre or a person is unimpressed”). Several years ago, George Meyer was caught by surprise when a
Simpsons
writer shared a memory with him about the episode in which
meh
first appeared. “He reminded me I had worked on that episode, and he thought I came up with the word
meh
. I didn’t remember it.” When I asked Tim Long who created
meh
, he was pretty confident it was George Meyer. “I’m almost sure he invented
meh
. It’s everywhere—most people don’t even realize it started with
The Simpsons
.” Eventually, conversations with writers jogged Meyer’s memory. “I was trying to think of a word that would be the easiest word to say with minimal effort—just a parting of the lips and air would come out.”

Why didn’t Meyer have a better memory of his contributions? As a giver, his focus was on achieving a collective result that entertained others, not on claiming personal responsibility for that result. He would suggest as many lines, jokes, and words as possible, letting others run with them and incorporate them into their scripts. His attention centered on improving the overall quality of the script, rather than on tracking who was responsible for it. “A lot of the stuff is just like a basketball assist. When somebody would say, ‘George, that was yours,’ I genuinely did not know,” Meyer says. “I tended to not be able to remember the stuff that I had done, so I wasn’t always saying when
I
did this and that. I was saying when
we
did this and that. I think it’s good to get into the habit of doing that.”