Why People Pay

Roberto Saviano was sitting in a pizzeria with some teenagers from a clan. They were between thirteen and sixteen. The waiters, boys their own age, “looked at them with admiration, not daring even to serve them”. The owner had to carry the plates himself.

Saviano explains why. Carrying plates or learning a trade is shameful there. “A clan member will never stoop to working as an apprentice, and no girl will accept the advances of a loser.” And what these boys dreamed of, he writes, was “the fame not of Al Capone but of Flavio Briatore”. They didn’t want to shoot for pay. They wanted to wheel and deal, with models hanging around them.

They risked their lives. Not for wages. They were paying for the look in the waiter’s eyes, and the girl’s. Remember that the next time you decide you know what the man across the table wants.

The Boy and His Uncle

In 1973 Leonardo Vitale walked into police headquarters in Palermo of his own accord, sat down and told them everything he knew about his family. That was long before Tommaso Buscetta and the other famous turncoats. He was hardly believed, and hardly anyone was convicted. The psychiatrists declared him “partially sane”, and he spent most of his sentence in an asylum. He came out in June 1984, and on 2 December he was shot dead on his way home from Mass. Six months of freedom.

He told the psychiatrists how he had become a mafioso. The historian John Dickie retells it in detail. Leonardo’s father died early. His place was taken by an uncle, who was also the capo of the local family. The uncle, as Vitale put it, was everything to him. The uncle noticed the adoration in his nephew’s eyes and began to test him. As if in passing, he’d ask the boy whether he saw his hands: they had blood on them, and his father’s hands had even more. Then he demanded proof of courage. Leonardo killed a horse. At nineteen he was told to kill a man, and he did. His reward was a lark hunt with his uncle, and initiation.

Vitale’s own account of his path was muddled: he had wanted to master himself, it had been a protest against God, and also, he said, he had wanted to become a man. There’s inner turmoil in that, and a quarrel with God, and the approval of the man who was everything to him. And Dickie adds a sober note: in the Vitale family the Mafia was handed down from generation to generation, so the road had been laid before he was born. A motive is rarely single. Usually it’s a tangle, and the man himself doesn’t know which thread he’s being pulled by.

What They Say and What Drives Them

The American psychologist David McClelland spent half his life studying what drives people. He picked out three great forces: the need for achievement, the need for closeness and the need for power. What matters more is how he measured them. He didn’t ask people what they wanted. He showed them ambiguous pictures and asked them to make up what was going on. Then the stories were scored by strict rules, by several trained people working separately, who checked whether their scores agreed. One made-up story proves nothing. Hundreds of stories read by the same yardstick showed something.

In 1989 McClelland and his colleagues brought together the studies that had compared such stories with questionnaires. In the questionnaires, people described their motives themselves. The two matched poorly. The questionnaire was better at predicting what a man would choose when asked and given time to think. The stories, at predicting what he does on his own, over long stretches, when nobody’s asking. That doesn’t mean people lie about themselves. It means a motive has several voices, and they’re under no obligation to sing in chorus. So listen to the story a man tells about himself, but watch what he does as well. And hold your guess about someone else’s motive as a guess until you’ve tested it.

An Argument for One Man

An FBI agent called Chuck put on a James Brown concert at the Beacon Theatre. Albert, an acquaintance of Pistone’s from the Colombo circle, conferred with his pals and decided to rob the box office. The agents’ own box office. Funny, and dangerous. There was no way to forbid it without giving themselves away. So the agents played on his share: if his boys hit the box office, they told him, he’d end up with less himself. Split three ways pays better than five.

Albert got it. His pals didn’t; they were counting on the whole score. What saved the day was the cops Chuck had posted at the entrance, supposedly to keep an eye on the crowd. The argument was precise, but precise for one man. Everyone in a group has his own reason, and hitting all of them at once with one argument is next to impossible.

The Cook Who Didn’t Want a Discount

We had a young cook at a little trattoria. He bought his oil from a market wholesaler and looked at ours without interest. Twice I went to him with a price. The price left him cold. The Don heard me out in silence.

The Don went himself, had lunch and offered nothing. Only, as he was leaving, he said the last time he’d eaten a fried artichoke like that was in Sicily. And he invited him to the November evening for young cooks, to show the others how he fried them. The cook came. He showed them. The next week he sent his first order, and he bought oil from us for many years.

He didn’t need to pay less. He needed a respected old man to call him a master in front of everyone. The Don pulled the same lever as Vitale’s uncle. Only he praised the man for something he really could do, and asked for nothing in return but an honest order.

The Bottom Line

Done honestly, it looks like this. Watch what a man does over years, not only what he says about himself. Work out what he’s really paying for—recognition, peace of mind, a place among his own—and test the guess with a deed, the way the Don tested his with a lunch. If you’ve guessed right, give him that, if you can give it for real. Recognition for good work is often worth more than a discount, and it costs you less.

And from the other side, ask yourself which thread you’re being pulled by. If you’re being bought with a seat at the table, an elder’s respect, a waiter’s admiring look, check what they want in return. Vitale’s uncle paid in recognition too. It was the nephew who settled the bill.