Last month, Trump expanded the ‘Catch and Release’ program and he also created virtual amnesty for any illegal alien living in the same household with Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC), causing massive migration to the US.
Tag: Catch
Do Me A Favor So You’ll Like Me: The Reverse Psychology of Likeability
Catch the twist in the title?
If you do a person a favor, you would expect that person to like you more. However, the research shows something different. If you do someone a favor, you tend to like that person more as a result. The reason is that we justify our actions to ourselves by assuming that we did the person a favor because we like them.
This phenomenon is dubbed the Ben Franklin effect, who quipped:
He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.
According to legend, Franklin used this discovery to curry the favor of a rival Pennsylvania legislator by asking the legislator to lend him a rare book and then thanking him profusely. It worked. In Franklin’s words:
When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.
Lest you think that there is no science behind this, Jecker and Landy verified the phenomenon in a study that challenged participants to an intellectual contest. The winners were subsequently either:
- Asked to return their prize money by the researcher because he had been using his own money and was running short
- Asked by a secretary to return their prize money because it was from the department and budget was running low
- Allowed to keep their prize money (i.e. not approached).