In the Yiddish-speaking world from which my mother came, every compliment had a slight critical inference.  Being called a “nice guy,” for example, implied that yes, you are nice, but you probably wouldn’t last long in the real world. Now, a large body of research supports the notion that being nice may not be so good for one’s health.

Years ago I was asked to do a presentation at the Wellness Center in Pasadena, a place devoted to supporting cancer survivors.  I knew my audience, all cancer survivors, was going to be well versed, so I boned up on the literature as best as I could, and I read hundreds of abstracts and several key articles on the relationship between cancer and anger, which was the topic I decided to speak on.

Most of us are familiar with the research describing the “Type A personality,” the hard-driving, ambitious, compulsive personality associated with heart disease.   Years later, cancer researchers developed a profile they called the “Type C,” or cancer-prone personality.   The “Type C” personality is described as patient, dependable, emotionally repressed, thoughtful and unassertive.  In the literature, I have seen it described simply and elegantly as “nice.”

The most recent literature associates “Type C” traits with autoimmune disorders, within which cancer can arguably be included.   Saying though that cancer is associated with a certain personality type is a sticky wicket because anything that correlates personality factors with cancer can lead quickly to self-blame; after all, one’s personality is something one can supposedly do something about.   So, as I say often, it must be emphasized that correlation does not equate to causality, but just gives us some things to think about.

In a recent study at Stanford, hairless mice were exposed to ultraviolet rays for 10 minutes at a time three times a week for 10 weeks, exposure roughly equivalent to that of humans who spend just a bit too much time surfing (the real kind, with the ocean beneath them) or sunbathing.  After several months, as was predicted, every mouse developed skin cancer.  But here’s the rub:  the “nervous” mice, that is, the ones who had proclivities for risk aversion and reticence (which had been previously determined by behavioral tests), had more tumors than the calmer mice and were the only ones to develop invasive forms of cancer.  In this study, the researchers used measures of reticence and risk aversion to define a mouse as “nervous,” but it seems just as valid to call reticent and risk-averse mice “nice,” and besides, “nice mice” just sounds a whole lot better.

Generalizing from mouse behavior to human behavior isn’t a terribly reliable thing to do, but it is necessary because doing this kind of research with humans raises some fairly significant ethical concerns.     So, while we can’t say for sure that nice guys always finish last, at least for mice, we can probably say that nice mice come to a finish first.

Study citation:  PLoS ONE, online, April 25, 2012.