There is nothing more effective in selling anything than getting customers to believe, really believe, you like them.

—Joe Girard, Guinness Book of World Records “Greatest Car Salesman”

Few of us would be surprised to learn that we are more influenced by the people we like—for example, our friends. What might be startling to note, however, is that this simple liking rule can apply to individuals we’ve never interacted with closely or even met. Consider how the tendency offers a solution to a problem that has vexed science communicators for decades: how to get more people to accept Darwin’s theory of evolution, which asserts that all living things, including humans, have come to their present form entirely through systematic processes of evolution, such as natural selection. It’s been a tough sell for these communicators because evolutionary claims often run counter to the beliefs of religious groups that view God’s hand as determining what makes us human. Indeed, in a recent survey on the topic, only 33 percent of Americans agreed that we’ve developed as a species solely via natural evolutionary processes.

In response, science researchers, teachers, and proponents have tried to increase the percentage of believers by (a) describing the near consensus among scientists regarding the validity of evolutionary theory, (b) pointing to the thousands of studies that have confirmed evolutionary thinking, (c) highlighting the advances in medicine, genetics, agriculture, and pharmacology that have come from the application of evolutionary principles, and (d) advocating for greater agreement with the logic of evolutionary theory through more intensive teaching of it. All with little success. For example, the last of these approaches—trying to build belief in evolutionary theory by way of better instruction—is futile because research shows there is no connection between one’s belief in evolution and one’s understanding of its logic. There’s good reason for the disconnect: resistance to the theory of evolution doesn’t stem from perceived inconsistencies in its logic; it stems from the theory’s perceived inconsistencies with people’s emotionally based preferences, beliefs, and values, which are frequently grounded in existing religious affiliations.

Thus, it’s a fool’s errand to try to overcome faith-based, emotionally held beliefs with logical argumentation, as each represents a separate way of knowing. The British writer Jonathan Swift saw it three hundred years ago and declared, “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into”—and thereby provided a tactical lesson science communicators have nevertheless failed to learn. Because they prioritize thinking over all else as a way of knowing, science communicators have persisted in the assumption that the facts will win over audiences reacting not to the facts about evolution but to their feelings about the idea. Is there any persuasive approach that could come to the rescue of these misguided communicators?

Enter the liking rule. A team of Canadian psychologists thought they could elevate attitudes toward evolution with the simple news that a widely liked individual supported evolutionary theory. Who did they spotlight as this champion of Darwinian principles? George Clooney.

In the study, when people were led to believe Clooney had made favorable comments about a book that took a pro-evolutionary stance, they became significantly more accepting of the theory. What’s more, the change occurred regardless of the participants’ age, sex, or degree of religiosity. To assure the result wasn’t due to something unique to George Clooney, or to a male celebrity, the researchers redid the study using a widely liked female celebrity, the actress Emma Watson (of Harry Potter movies’ fame), and found the same pattern. For would-be persuaders, the message is plain: to change feelings, counteract them with other feelings; and liking for a communicator offers a useful source of such feelings.

To get an idea of how powerful feelings of liking can be in directing people’s choices, consider the response of top medical malpractice attorney Alice Burkin to the following interview question:

Interviewer: Every doctor makes an occasional mistake. But most of those mistakes don’t turn into malpractice suits. Why do some doctors get sued more than others?

Burkin: I’d say the most important factor in many of our cases—besides the negligence itself—is the quality of the doctor-patient relationship. In all the years I’ve been in this business, I’ve never had a potential client walk in and say, “I really like this doctor, but I want to sue him.” . . . People just don’t sue the doctors they like.¹

Liking for Profit

The clearest illustration I know of the commercial exploitation of the liking rule is the Tupperware “home party,” which I consider a classic compliance setting. Anybody familiar with the workings of a Tupperware party will recognize the use of the various principles of influence covered in this book:

Reciprocation: To start, games are played and prizes won by the partygoers; anyone who doesn’t win a prize gets to choose one from a grab bag so that everyone has received a gift before the buying begins.
Authority: The quality and safety of Tupperware products are shown to be certified by experts.
Social Proof: Once the buying begins, each purchase builds the idea that other, similar people want the products; therefore, they must be good.
Scarcity: Unique benefits and limited-time offers are always described.
Commitment and Consistency: Early on, participants are urged to make a public commitment to Tupperware by describing aloud the uses and benefits they have found for the Tupperware they already own.
Unity: Upon making a purchase, guests are welcomed to “the Tupperware family.”

Although each of the principles of influence is present to help things along, the real power of the Tupperware party comes from a particular arrangement that trades on the liking rule. Despite the entertaining and persuasive selling skills of the Tupperware demonstrator, the true request to purchase does not come from this stranger; it comes from a friend to every person in the room. Oh, the Tupperware representative may physically ask for each partygoer’s order, but the more psychologically compelling requester is sitting off to the side, smiling, chatting, and serving refreshments. She is the party hostess, who has called her friends together for the demonstration in her home and who, everyone knows, makes a profit from each piece sold at the party.

By providing the hostess with a percentage of the take, the Tupperware Brands Corporation arranges for its customers to buy from and for a friend rather than an unknown salesperson. In this way, the attraction, warmth, security, and obligation of friendship are brought to bear on the sales setting. In fact, consumer researchers who have examined the social ties between the hostess and the partygoers in home-party sales settings have affirmed the power of the company’s approach: the strength of that social bond is twice as likely to determine purchases as is preference for the product itself.

The results have been remarkable. It was recently estimated that Tupperware sales now exceed $5.5 million a day. Indeed, Tupperware’s success has spread around the world to countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, where one’s place in a social network of friends and family is more personally important than it is in the United States. As a consequence, less than a quarter of Tupperware sales now take place in North America.

What is interesting is that the customers appear to be fully aware of the liking and friendship pressures embodied in the Tupperware home party. Some don’t seem to mind; others do, but don’t seem to know how to avoid the pressures. One woman I spoke with described her reactions with more than a bit of frustration in her voice.

It’s gotten to the point now where I hate to be invited to Tupperware parties. I’ve got all the containers I need; and if I wanted any more, I could buy another brand cheaper in the store. But when a friend calls up, I feel like I have to go. And when I get there, I feel like I have to buy something. What can I do? It’s for one of my friends.

With so irresistible an ally as friendship, it’s little wonder that Tupperware Brands has abandoned retail sales outlets and pushes the home-party concept instead. For example, in 2003 the company did something that would defy logic for almost any other business: it severed its profitable relationship with the huge retailer Target—because sales of their products at Target locations were too strong! The partnership had to be ended because of its damaging effect on the number of home parties that could be arranged.

Statistics reveal that a Tupperware party now starts somewhere in the world every 1.8 seconds. Of course, all sorts of other compliance professionals recognize the pressure to say yes to someone we know and like. Take, for instance, the growing number of charity organizations that recruit volunteers to canvass for donations close to their own homes. They understand perfectly how much more difficult it is for us to turn down a charity request when it comes from a friend or neighbor.

Figure 3.1: A home party “sell-ebration”

At home parties, such as this Tupperware-style party for a line of eco-friendly cleaning products, the bond that exists between the partygoers and the party hostess usually seals the sale.

Hiroko Masuike/New York Times

Other compliance professionals have found the friend doesn’t even have to be present to be effective; often, just the mention of the friend’s name is enough. The Shaklee Corporation, which specializes in sales of various nutritional products, advises its salespeople to use the “endless chain” method for finding new customers. Once a customer admits he or she likes a product, that customer can be pressed for the names of friends who would also appreciate learning about it. The individuals on that list can then be approached for sales and a list of their friends, who can serve as sources for still other potential customers, and so on in an endless chain.

The key to the success of the method is that each new prospect is visited by a salesperson armed with the name of a friend “who suggested I call on you.” Turning the salesperson away under those circumstances is difficult; it’s almost like rejecting the friend. The Shaklee sales manual insists that employees use this system: “It would be impossible to overestimate its value. Phoning or calling on a prospect and being able to say that Mr. So-and-so, a friend of his, felt he would benefit by giving you a few moments of his time is virtually as good as a sale 50 percent made before you enter.” A Nielsen Company survey tells us why the Shaklee Corporation’s “endless chain” technique is so successful: 92 percent of consumers trust product recommendations from someone they know, such as a liked friend, which is far more than any other source and 22 percent more than the next highest source, online reviewers. This elevated level of trust of friends turns into what researchers termed “stunning profits” for the recommended companies. An analysis of one bank’s refer-a-friend program found that, compared to ordinary new customers, those referred by a friend proved 18 percent more loyal to the bank over a three-year period and 16 percent more profitable.²

READER’S REPORT 3.1

From a Chicago man

Although I’ve never been to a Tupperware Party, I recognized the same kind of friendship pressures recently when I got a call from a long distance phone company saleswoman. She told me that one of my buddies had placed my name on something called the “MCI Friends and Family Calling Circle.”

This friend of mine, Brad, is a guy I grew up with but who moved to New Jersey last year for a job. He still calls me pretty regularly to get the news on the guys we used to hang out with. The saleswoman told me that he could save 20 percent on all the calls he made to the people on his Calling Circle list, provided they are MCI phone company subscribers. Then she asked me if I wanted to switch to MCI to get all the blah, blah, blah benefits of MCI service, and so that Brad could save 20 percent on his calls to me.

Well, I couldn’t have cared less about the benefits of MCI service; I was perfectly happy with the phone company I had. But the part about wanting to save Brad money on our calls really got to me. For me to say I didn’t want to be in his Calling Circle and didn’t care about saving him money would have sounded like a real affront to our friendship when he heard about it. So, to avoid insulting him, I told her to switch me to MCI.

I used to wonder why women would go to a Tupperware Party just because a friend was holding it, and then buy stuff they didn’t want. I don’t wonder anymore.

Author’s note: This reader is not alone in being able to testify to the power of the pressures embodied in MCI’s Calling Circle idea. When Consumer Reports magazine inquired into the practice, the MCI salesperson it interviewed was quite succinct: “It works 9 out of 10 times,” he said.

I’ve opted to retain this example, even though MCI and its Calling Circle are out of date, because it is so instructive. More modern versions still appear in the referral-to-friends programs of many companies. These programs have proved quite effective. Consider, when a single Tesla owner referred 188 people from his social network, he made $135,000 in rewards and Tesla made $16 million in sales. On a personal note, a buddy at my gym recently received a “Refer A Friend” promotion from his internet provider, Cox Communications, which offered a $100 reduction off his bill if he successfully referred a new customer to Cox. When he showed it to me, I declined the offer because I knew what Cox was doing. But, still, I felt bad about it when I’d see him for weeks afterward.

Strategic Friendship: Making Friends to Influence People

Compliance practitioners’ widespread use of the liking bond between friends tells us much about the power of the liking rule to produce assent. In fact, we find that such professionals seek to benefit from the rule even when already formed friendships are not present for them to employ. Under these circumstances, the professionals make use of the liking bond by employing a compliance strategy that is quite direct: they first get us to like them.

There was a man in Detroit, Joe Girard, who specialized in using the liking rule to sell Chevrolets. He became wealthy in the process, making hundreds of thousands dollars a year. With such a salary, we might guess he was a high-level General Motors executive or perhaps the owner of a Chevrolet dealership. But no. He made his money as a salesman on the showroom floor. He was phenomenal at what he did. For twelve years straight, he won the title of “Number One Car Salesman”; he averaged more than five cars and trucks sold every day he worked; and he has been called the world’s “Greatest Car Salesman” by the Guinness Book of World Records.

Figure 3.2: Joe Girard: “I like you.”

Mr. Girard reveals what he told his thirteen thousand customers every year, twelve times a year (on mailed cards), that helped him become the world’s “Greatest Car Salesman.”

Getty Images

For all his success, the formula he employed was surprisingly simple. It consisted of offering people just two things: a fair price and someone they liked to buy from. “And that’s it,” he claimed in an interview. “Finding the salesman you like, plus the price. Put them both together, and you get a deal.”

Fine. The Joe Girard formula tells us how vital the liking rule is to business, but it doesn’t tell us nearly enough. For one thing, it doesn’t tell us why customers liked him more than some other salesperson who offered a fair price. There is a crucial general question Joe’s formula leaves unanswered: What are the factors that cause one person to like another? If we knew that answer, we would be a long way toward understanding how people such as Joe can so successfully arrange to have us like them and, conversely, how we might successfully arrange for others to like us. Fortunately, behavioral scientists have been asking this question for decades. The accumulated evidence has allowed them to identify a number of factors that reliably cause liking. Each is cleverly used by compliance professionals to urge us along the road to yes.

Why Do I Like You? Let Me List the Reasons

Physical Attractiveness

Although it is generally acknowledged that good-looking people have an advantage in social interaction, research indicates we may have sorely underestimated the size and reach of that advantage. There seems to be a click, run response to attractive individuals. Like all such reactions, it happens automatically, without forethought. The response itself falls into a category that social scientists call halo effects. A halo effect occurs when one positive characteristic of a person dominates the way he or she is viewed in most other respects. The evidence is now clear that physical attractiveness is often such a characteristic.

We automatically assign to good-looking individuals such favorable traits as talent, kindness, honesty, agreeableness, trustworthiness, and intelligence. Furthermore, we make these judgments without realizing attractiveness has played a role in the process. Some consequences of this unconscious assumption that “good looking = good” scare me. For example, a study of a Canadian federal election found attractive candidates received more than two-and-a-half times as many votes as unattractive ones. Despite such evidence of favoritism toward the better-looking politicians, follow-up research demonstrated voters did not realize their bias. In fact, 73 percent of Canadian voters surveyed denied in the strongest possible terms that their votes had been influenced by physical appearance; only 14 percent even allowed for the remote possibility of such influence. Voters can deny the impact of attractiveness on electability all they want, but evidence has continued to confirm its troubling presence.

A similar effect has been found in hiring situations. In one study, good grooming of applicants in a simulated employment interview accounted for more favorable hiring decisions than did job qualifications—this, even though the interviewers claimed that appearance played only a small role in their choices. The advantage given to attractive workers extends past hiring day to payday. Economists examining US and Canadian samples found that attractive individuals get paid considerably more than their less attractive coworkers do. One scientist, Daniel Hamermesh, who wrote a book on the topic, estimated that over the course of one’s career, being attractive earns a worker an extra $230,000. Hamermesh assures us that his findings can’t be explained as bragging on his part, declaring that on a ten-point scale, “I’m a 3.”

Other experiments have demonstrated that attractive people are more likely to obtain help when in need and are more persuasive in changing the opinions of an audience. Thus, it’s apparent that good-looking people enjoy an enormous social advantage in our culture. They are better liked, better paid, more persuasive, more frequently helped, and seen as possessing more desirable personality traits and greater intellectual capacities. Moreover, the social benefits of good looks begin to accumulate early. Adults view aggressive acts as less naughty when performed by attractive elementary school children, and teachers presume nice-looking children to be more intelligent than their less attractive classmates.

It is hardly any wonder, then, that the halo effect of physical attractiveness is regularly exploited by compliance professionals. Because we like attractive people and because we tend to comply with those we like, it makes sense that sales training programs include grooming hints, fashionable clothiers select their floor staffs from among the eye-catching candidates, and con artists are comely.³

Similarity

But what if physical appearance is not much at issue? After all, most people possess average looks. Are there other factors that can be used to produce liking? As both researchers and compliance practitioners know, there are several, and one of the most influential is similarity.

We like people who are like us. It’s a fact that applies to human infants as young as nine months and holds true later in life whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or lifestyle. In a massive study of 421 million potential romantic matches from an online dating site, the factor that best predicted favorability toward a partner was similarity. As the researchers stated, “For nearly all characteristics, the more similar the individuals were, the higher the likelihood was of them finding each other desirable and opting to meet in person.”

Consequently, those who want us to like them so we will favor them can accomplish their purpose by appearing similar to us in a variety of ways. Dress is a good example. Several studies have demonstrated that we are more likely to help those who wear clothing akin to ours. One showed how automatic our positive response to these others can be. Marchers in an antiwar demonstration were found, first, to be more likely to sign the petition of a similarly dressed requester and, second, to do so without bothering to read it first. Click, run.

Another way requesters can manipulate similarity to increase liking and compliance is to claim that they have interests similar to ours. Car salespeople, for example, are trained to look for evidence of such things while examining a customer’s trade-in. If there is camping gear in the trunk, the salespeople might mention, later on, how they love to get away from the city whenever they can; if there are golf balls on the back seat, they might remark they hope the rain will hold off until they can play the eighteen holes they’ve scheduled for the next day.

As trivial as these commonalities may seem, they get results. After learning of a comparable fingerprint type, individuals become more helpful to their “fingerprint pattern partner.” People are even more likely to purchase a product if its brand name shares initial letters with their own name. In a related piece of research, one investigator increased the percentage of recipients who responded to a mailed survey by changing one small feature of the request: on a cover letter, he modified the name of the survey-taker to be similar to that of the survey recipient. Thus, Robert Greer received his survey from a survey-center official named Bob Gregar, while Cynthia Johnston received hers from a survey-center official named Cindy Johanson. Adding this bit of name resemblance to the invitation nearly doubled survey completion.

Even organizations can be susceptible to the tendency to overvalue things that include elements of their names. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of rock ’n’ roll, Rolling Stone magazine issued a list of the five hundred greatest songs of the rock era. The number-one and number-two highest-ranked songs, as compiled and weighted by Rolling Stone’s editors, were “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan and “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. At the time of this writing, I checked ten comparable lists of the greatest rock ’n’ roll songs, and none listed either of Rolling Stone’s picks as its number-one or number-two choice.⁴

There’s more. In educational settings, the factor that plays the largest role in the success of youth mentoring programs is the initial similarity of interests between student and mentor; plus, when teachers and their ninth-grade students received information about similarities between them, the students’ grades improved significantly in those teachers’ courses. Likewise, in negotiations, bargainers are much more likely to come to an agreement after learning of similarities with their bargaining opponent (“Oh, you’re a runner; I’m a runner!”). It should come as no surprise, then, that voters prefer political candidates who share minor facial similarities with them nor that parallels in language styles (the types of words and verbal expressions that conversation partners use) and electronic-texting styles increase romantic attraction and—somewhat amazingly—the likelihood that a hostage negotiation will end peacefully.

Figure 3.3: “Cheep” real estate

The potent influence of similarity on sales is something compliance professionals have long understood.

Because even small similarities can producing liking and because a veneer of similarity can be so easily manufactured, I would advise special caution in the presence of requesters who claim to be “just like you.” Indeed, it would be wise these days to be careful around influencers who merely seem to be just like you. For one reason, we typically underestimate the degree to which similarity affects our liking for another. In addition, many influence training programs now urge trainees to deliberately mimic their target’s body posture and verbal style, as similarities along these dimensions have been shown to lead to positive results. Take as evidence that (a) food servers trained to mimic customers’ words received higher tips; (b) salespeople instructed to mirror customers’ verbal and nonverbal behavior sold more electronic equipment; and (c) negotiators taught to imitate opponents’ language or body movements got better results whether they were American, Dutch, or Thai. Not to be outdone by their commercial counterparts, relationship advisers are now advocating the use of contrived commonalities—with good success: women who, in speed-dating interactions, were coached to mimic the speech and body language of their dates were rated as more sexually attractive, which led to more follow-up contact requests.⁵

EBOX 3.1

Author’s note: Online persuaders are often advised to boost liking by employing the same influence practices as those who operate face-to-face. Consequently, we should be aware of them when they occur on e-commerce platforms. For instance, consider how the impressive website Psychology for Marketers counsels digital marketers to harness the liking principle via similarity and friendship practices.

Liking

I’m sure you’ve experienced this principle for yourself many times. We find it much more difficult to say no when a request comes from our friends. You can make somebody like you by using a few simple techniques: be around them to create a feeling of familiarity, point to similarities between you, mirror their behavior, do small favors for them, and show that you like them.

How to use it in online marketing: Use the language of your audience. Using words, phrases, and slang common to the group will work even better. On the other hand, if you use words that your audience doesn’t use or doesn’t understand, you are creating a distance between you and giving them nothing to relate to.

Social media and emails are perfect to interact with your audience. Make sure you first reach out to them without asking them to do anything—just as you would with your friends.

If contrived commonalities appear unethical to you and manufactured mimicry seems trickery, I wouldn’t disagree. The desire to be liked is a basic human goal, but its achievement doesn’t justify falsification, as in the presentation of fabricated similarities. On the other hand, working strategically to be liked, perhaps by expending effort to uncover and communicate genuine parallels with others, doesn’t strike me as objectionable at all. In fact, I’d consider it commendable in many situations as a way to prompt harmonious interactions. Commendable or not, such a goal isn’t easy to achieve because, as a rule, we tend to pay attention to differences rather than similarities.

Typically, people are more ready to search for and register separations than connections. It’s so for physical dimensions, such as the weight and size of objects, where observers see differences before and more often than they do commonalities. And it’s so for more social dimensions, such as the presence or absence of existing harmonies among interacting parties. An analysis by Dr. Leigh Thompson of thirty-two separate negotiation studies found that rival negotiators failed to identify and make reference to shared interests and aims 50 percent of the time—even when those commonalities were real, present, and waiting to be tapped for increased liking and mutually beneficial outcomes.

This regrettable tendency may account for some of the social distance members of racial or ethnic groups maintain between themselves and individuals of other such groups. They focus mainly on cross-group differences, which causes them to underestimate the positivity of potential interactions with out-group members and which, understandably, can reduce the number of actual interactions sought. One set of researchers conducted a set of studies supporting this reasoning. White college students who anticipated a conversation with a Black student and then actually engaged in the conversation had underestimated their true enjoyment of the conversation itself because, beforehand, they’d focused too much on perceived differences from their partner. When, in exactly the same experimental situation, a different sample of students was asked to pay attention to any similarities with their future conversation partners, everything changed. This strategic focus on genuine similarities corrected the negative outlook White students carried into their conversations. Under these circumstances, their now positive expectations matched their actual positive experiences with the Black students.

Results such as these offer us a way to expand the range of our satisfying personal interactions. We can look for and focus on parallels with dissimilar-seeming others and eliminate the mistake of expecting too little from those others.⁶

Compliments

In 1713, Jonathan Swift declared in a famous line of poetry, “’Tis an old maxim in the schools / That flattery’s the food of fools.” But he failed to tell us how eager people are to swallow those empty calories. For instance, with a remark as instructive as it is humorous, the comedic actor McLean Stevenson once described how his wife “tricked” him into marriage: “She said she liked me.” Today, the “likes” frequently occur online and with a comparable effect on positive feelings. In a brain-imaging study, researchers found that when teenagers’ social-media photos received lots of “likes,” the reward sectors of their brains lit up like Christmas trees—the same reward sectors normally activated by such desirable events as eating chocolate or winning money.

The information that someone fancies us can be a bewitchingly effective means for producing return liking and willing compliance. Therefore, when people flatter or claim affinity for us, they may well want something. If so, they’ll likely get it. After being complimented by a server in a restaurant (“You made a good choice”) or by a stylist in a hair salon (“Any hairstyle would look good on you”) customers responded with significantly larger tips. Likewise, candidates in employment interviews received more favorable hiring recommendations from the interviewer and eventual job offers if, during the interaction, they complimented the interviewer.

Even our technological devices can benefit from conveying a compliment. Individuals who worked on a digital assignment and received flattering feedback from their computer (“You seem to have an uncommon ability to structure data logically”) developed more favorable feelings toward the machine, even though they were told that the feedback had been preprogrammed and did not reflect their actual task performance. More remarkable still, they also became prouder of their performances after receiving this hollow praise. Plainly, we believe compliments of sundry sorts and like those who give them to us.⁷

Remember Joe Girard, the world’s “Greatest Car Salesman,” who says the secret of his success was getting customers to like him? He did something that, on the face of it, seems foolish and costly. Each month he sent every one of his more than thirteen thousand former customers a holiday greeting card containing a printed message. The holiday greeting card changed from month to month (Happy New Year, Happy Valentine’s Day, Happy Thanksgiving, and so on), but the message printed on the face of the card never varied. It read, “I like you.” As Joe explained it, “There’s nothing else on the card, nothin’ but my name. I’m just telling ’em that I like ’em.”

Figure 3.4: Compliments Produce Automatic (Mechanical) Attraction.

Dilbert: Scott Adams 6/25/02. Distributed by United Features Syndicate, Inc.

“I like you.” It came in the mail twelve times a year, every year, like clockwork. “I like you,” on a printed card that went to thirteen thousand other people too. Could a statement of liking so impersonal, so obviously designed to sell cars, really work? Joe Girard thought so, and a man as successful as he was at what he did deserves our attention. Joe understood an important fact about human nature: we are phenomenal suckers for flattery.

An experiment done on a group of men in North Carolina shows how helpless we can be in the face of praise. The men received comments about themselves from another person who needed a favor from them. Some of the men got only positive comments, some got only negative comments, and some got a mixture of good and bad. There were three interesting findings. First, the evaluator who provided only praise was liked best. Second, this tendency held true even when the men fully realized that the flatterer stood to gain from their liking of him. Finally, unlike the other types of comments, pure praise did not have to be accurate to work. Positive comments produced just as much liking for the flatterer when they were untrue as when they were true.

Apparently we have such an automatically favorable reaction to compliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious attempt to win our favor. Click, run. When seen in this light, the expense of printing and mailing well over 150,000 “I like you” cards each year seems neither as foolish nor as costly as before.⁸

Fortunately, as with sham similarities, counterfeit compliments aren’t the only variety available to us. Honest praise is likely to be at least as effective as its phony form in generating favorable outcomes. With that said, it’s time for a confession. Of all the influence practices described in this book, herein lies my greatest shortcoming: for whatever reason (it probably comes from the way I was raised), I have always had a hard time giving warranted praise. I can’t count the number of times I have been in a research meeting with graduate students and commented, “What Jessica [or Brad or Linda or Vlad or Noah or Chad or Rosanna] just said is really insightful”—to myself! By never moving the appreciative comment from my mind to my tongue, I regularly lost all the goodwill that would accompany the transfer.

No longer. I consciously fight the liability now, spotlighting any privately held admiration and announcing it out loud. The results have been good for all concerned. They’ve been so good that I have started trying to identify circumstances under which sincere flattery can be especially beneficial to the flatterer. One is obvious—when the praise boosts the recipient at a time or on a dimension of perceived weakness; consequently, I won’t devote further space to it. There are two others, though, that are little recognized and deserve attention.

Give a compliment behind a deserving person’s back. My new habit of complimenting my students publicly in research meetings has worked well for me, in part because I’m in charge. In many meetings, though, you might not be the leader, and it might not be appropriate to be the one dispensing praise. Suppose you are at work and, in a meeting, your boss says something you consider very smart. It could be awkward and may appear self-serving to speak up and say so. What could you do instead? To be clear, my students were rarely confronted with this problem. Nonetheless, I have a solution: during a coffee break or at the end of the meeting, tell the boss’s assistant of your opinion: “You know, I thought what Sandy said about XYZ was brilliant.”

Several outcomes are likely. First, because people want to be associated with good news in the minds of others and actively arrange for it, the assistant will most probably tell your boss what you said. Second, because you didn’t offer your positive assessment for the boss’s ears, no one (observers or boss) should assign you an unattractive ulterior motive. Third, because of what we know about the psychology of received compliments, your boss will believe your (sincere) praise and like you more for it.⁹

Find and give genuine compliments you want the recipient to live up to. People feel good about themselves after a compliment and proud of whatever trait or behavior produced the praise. Accordingly, one particularly beneficial form of sincere flattery would be to praise people when they’ve done a good thing we’d like them to continue doing. That way, they would be motivated to do more of the good thing in the future in order to live up to the admirable reputation we’ve given them. This idea is related to an influence tactic called altercasting, in which an individual is assigned a particular social role in hopes the person will then act in accord with the role. For example, by highlighting the role of protector, an insurance agent would make parents more willing to purchase life-insurance protection for their families.

While doing the preliminary research for this book, I witnessed, by accident, the power of the technique. At the time, I wanted to go beyond my laboratory research findings concerning effective influence tactics and learn what compliance professionals—salespeople, marketers, advertisers, recruiters, charity solicitors—had found. After all, their economic survival depended on the success of the tactics they employed, which made me confident that, after decades of trial and error, they would have identified the most powerful practices. Regrettably, I was equally confident they wouldn’t offer up their hard-won knowledge just because I asked for it. Influence professionals are notoriously protective about keeping their most effective tactics to themselves.

So, instead, I began answering ads and enrolling, incognito, in their training programs, where they were eager to communicate all manner of learned lessons to their trainees. As expected, posing as an aspiring compliance professional in these settings gave me access to a trove of information that would have been otherwise denied to me. I was concerned, though, that when I revealed my true identity and purpose at the end of training and asked for permission to use the data I’d collected, the answer would almost always be no. Within my proposal, all the gain would be mine, all the potential injury theirs.

In most cases, that’s how things appeared to be going as faces reddened and gazes hardened when I finally admitted that my name wasn’t Rob Caulder, that I wasn’t a real trainee, that I was planning to write a book disclosing the information I’d collected, and that I wanted written consent to use their proprietary information in the book—until I added one more fact without knowing the impact it would have. I told the practitioners I was a university professor who studied social influence and wanted to “learn from you on the matter.” Regularly, they’d say something like, “You mean you’re a college professor expert on this topic, and we were your teachers?” When I had assured them they had heard me correctly, they would usually puff up their chests and respond (with the wave of a hand), “Of course you can share our wisdom.”

In retrospect, I can see why this accommodating response came so often. My last admission had cast the practitioners in the role of teachers; and teachers don’t hoard information. They disseminate it.

Since, I’ve recognized how the altercasting technique can be successfully combined with a genuine compliment. That is, rather than just assigning a role to another, such as protector or teacher, we could honestly praise another who exhibited a commendable trait such as helpfulness or conscientiousness. We could then expect to see more of the trait from the other in the future. Research supports the expectation. Children praised for their conscientiousness on a task performed more conscientiously on a related task days afterward. Similarly, adults complimented on their helpful tendencies became significantly more helpful in a separate setting much later.

I tried the technique recently at home. My newspaper has been delivered for several years by a carrier, Carl, who rolls by the house every day and tosses the morning paper from his car to my driveway. Most of the time, it lands close enough to the center of the driveway that it doesn’t get wet from the watering systems on either side that go off at about the same time. Each year during the holiday season, Carl has left a self-addressed envelope in one of the delivered papers. It’s designed to prompt me to send him a check as thanks for his service, which I always do. But, most recently, along with the check, I included a note praising the conscientiousness he’s shown by so often positioning my paper where it doesn’t get wet. In the past, Carl hit the driveway’s center area about 75 percent of the time. This year, 100 percent.

What’s the implication? If there’s someone who ordinarily performs commendably—perhaps a conscientious colleague who often comes prepared for meetings or a helpful friend who frequently tries hard to give useful feedback on your ideas—compliment him or her not just on the behavior but, instead, on the trait. You’ll probably see more of it.¹⁰

READER’S REPORT 3.2

From an MBA student in Arizona

While I was working in Boston, one of my coworkers, Chris, was always trying to push work onto my overcrowded desk. I’m normally pretty good at resisting these types of attempts. But Chris was fantastic at complimenting me before he’d request my assistance. He’d start by saying, “I heard you did a fantastic job with the such-and-such project, and I have a similar one I am hoping you can help me with.” Or, “Since you are so expert in X, could you help me out by putting together this assignment?” I never really cared much for Chris. However, in those few seconds, I always changed my mind, thinking that maybe he was a nice guy after all; and, then, I’d usually give in to his request for help.

Author’s note: Chris was more than just a flatterer. Notice how he structured his praise to give the reader a reputation to live up to that served his interests.

Contact and Cooperation

For the most part, we like things familiar to us. To prove the point to yourself, try a little experiment. Take a selfie that shows a front view of your face and print it. Then, go back to the selfie on your phone and edit it to show a reverse image (so that the right and left sides of your face are interchanged), and print that also. You’ll have a pair of pictures—one that shows you as you actually look (the second) and one that shows a reverse image (the first). Now decide which version of your face you like better and ask a good friend to make the choice too. If you are at all like the group of Milwaukee women on whom this kind of procedure was tried, you should notice something odd: your friend will prefer the true image, but you will prefer the reverse image. Why? Because you both will be responding favorably to the more familiar face—your friend to the one the world sees and you to the transposed one you find in the mirror every day.

Often we don’t realize our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it. For example, in a study of online advertising, banner ads for a camera were flashed five times, twenty times, or not at all at the top of an article participants read. The more frequently the ad appeared, the more the participants came to like the camera, even though they were not aware of seeing the ads for it. A similar effect occurred in an experiment in which the faces of several individuals were flashed on a screen so quickly that, later on, the subjects who were exposed to the faces in this manner couldn’t recall having seen any of them. Yet the more frequently a person’s face was flashed on the screen, the more these subjects came to like that person when they met in a subsequent interaction. And because greater liking leads to greater social influence, these subjects were also more persuaded by the opinion statements of the individuals whose faces had appeared on the screen most frequently.

In an age of “fake news,” internet bots, and media-hogging politicians, it’s alarming to think that people come to believe the communications they are exposed to most frequently, as it gives contemporary resonance to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels’s assertion, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” Particularly unsettling are the related findings that even far-fetched claims—the kind of allegations favored by fake-news creators—become more believable with repetition.¹¹

On the basis of evidence that we are more favorably disposed toward the things we have had contact with, some people have recommended a “contact” approach to improving race relations. They argue that simply by providing individuals of different ethnic backgrounds with more exposure to one another as equals, those individuals will naturally come to like each other better.

There is much research consistent with this argument. However, when scientists have examined school integration—the area offering one test of the widespread application of the contact approach—they have discovered the opposite pattern. School desegregation is more likely to increase prejudice between Blacks and Whites than decrease it.

Going to School on the Matter. Let’s stay with the issue of school desegregation for a while. However well intentioned the proponents of interracial harmony through simple contact are, their approach is unlikely to bear fruit because the argument on which it is based doesn’t apply to schools. First of all, the school setting is not a melting pot, where children interact as readily with members of other ethnic groups as they do with their own. Years after formal school integration, there is little social integration. The students clot together ethnically, separating themselves for the most part from other groups. Second, even if there were much more interethnic interaction, research shows that becoming familiar with something through repeated contact doesn’t necessarily cause greater liking. In fact, continued exposure to a person or object under unpleasant conditions such as frustration, conflict, or competition leads to less liking.¹²

The typical American classroom fosters precisely these unpleasant conditions. Consider the illuminating report of psychologist Elliot Aronson, called in to consult with school authorities on problems in the Austin, Texas, schools. His description of the way he found education proceeding in the standard classroom could apply to nearly any public school in the United States:

In general, here is how it works: The teacher stands in front of the class and asks a question. Six to ten children strain in their seats and wave their hands in the teacher’s face, eager to be called on and show how smart they are. Several others sit quietly with eyes averted, trying to become invisible. When the teacher calls on one child, you see looks of disappointment and dismay on the faces of the eager students, who missed a chance to get the teacher’s approval; and you will see relief on the faces of the others who didn’t know the answer. . . . This game is fiercely competitive and the stakes are high, because the kids are competing for the love and approval of one of the two or three most important people in their world.

Further, this teaching process guarantees that the children will not learn to like and understand each other. Conjure up your own experience. If you knew the right answer and the teacher called on someone else, you probably hoped that he or she would make a mistake so that you would have a chance to display your knowledge. If you were called on and failed, or if you didn’t even raise your hand to compete, you probably envied and resented your classmates who knew the answer. Children who fail in this system become jealous and resentful of the successes, putting them down as teacher’s pets or even resorting to violence against them in the school yard. The successful students, for their part, often hold the unsuccessful children in contempt, calling them “dumb” or “stupid.”

Should we wonder, then, why strict school desegregation—whether by enforced busing, district rezoning, or school closures—so frequently produces increased rather than decreased prejudice? When our children find their pleasant social and friendship contacts within their ethnic boundaries and get repeated exposure to other groups only in the competitive cauldron of the classroom, we might expect as much.

Are there available solutions to this problem? Fortunately, real hope for draining away that hostility has emerged from the research of education specialists into the concept of “cooperative learning.” Because much of the heightened prejudice from classroom desegregation seems to stem from increased exposure to outside group members as rivals, these educators have experimented with forms of learning in which cooperation rather than competition with classmates is central.¹³

Off to Camp. To understand the logic of the cooperative approach, it helps to reexamine the classic research program of Turkish-born social scientist Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues, including his wife, social psychologist Carolyn Wood Sherif. Intrigued with the issue of intergroup conflict, the research team decided to investigate the process as it developed in boys’ summer camps. Although the boys never realized that they were participants in an experiment, Sherif and his associates consistently engaged in artful manipulations of the camp’s social environment to observe the effects on group relations.

What the researchers learned is that it didn’t take much to bring on certain kinds of ill will. Simply separating the boys into two residence cabins was enough to stimulate a “we versus they” feeling between the groups; letting the boys assign names to the two groups (the Eagles and the Rattlers) accelerated the sense of rivalry. The boys soon began to demean the qualities and accomplishments of those in the other group; however, these forms of hostility were minor compared to what occurred when the experimenters introduced competitive activities into the groups’ interactions. Cabin-against-cabin treasure hunts, tugs-of-war, and athletic contests produced name-calling and confrontations. During the competitions, members of the opposing team were labeled “cheaters,” “sneaks,” and “stinkers.” Afterward, cabins were raided, rival banners were stolen and burned, threatening signs were posted, and lunchroom scuffles were commonplace.

At this point, it was evident that the recipe for disharmony was quick and easy. Just separate the participants into groups and let them stew for a while in their own juices. Then mix together over the flame of continued competition. And there you have it: cross-group hatred at a rolling boil.

A more challenging issue then faced the experimenters: how to remove the now entrenched hostility. They first tried the contact approach of bringing the bands together more often. Even when the joint activities were pleasant, such as movies and social events, the results were disastrous. Picnics produced food fights, entertainment programs gave way to shouting contests, dining-hall lines degenerated into shoving matches. The research team began to worry that, in Dr. Frankenstein fashion, they might have created a monster they could no longer control. Then, at the height of the strife, they tried a strategy that was at once simple and effective.

They constructed a series of situations in which competition between the groups would have harmed everyone’s interest; instead, cooperation was necessary for mutual benefit. On a daylong outing, the single truck available to go into town for food was “found” to be stuck. The boys were assembled and all pulled and pushed together until the vehicle was on its way. In another instance, the researchers arranged for an interruption of the camp’s water supply, which came through pipes from a distant tank. Presented with the common crisis and realizing the need for unified action, the boys organized themselves harmoniously to find and fix the problem before day’s end. In yet another circumstance requiring cooperation, the campers were informed that a desirable movie was available for rental but the camp could not afford it. Aware the only solution was to combine resources, the boys pooled their money for the film and spent a congenial evening together enjoying it.

The consequences of these cooperative ventures, though not instantaneous, were nonetheless striking. Successful joint efforts toward common goals steadily bridged the rift between the two groups. Before long, the verbal baiting had died, the jostling in lines had ended, and the boys had begun to intermix at the meal tables. Further, when asked to list their best friends, significant numbers changed from an earlier exclusive naming of in-group chums to a listing that included boys in the other group. Some even thanked the researchers for the opportunity to rate their friends again because they had changed their minds since the earlier evaluation. In one revealing episode, the boys were returning from a campfire on a single bus—something that would have produced bedlam before but, at that point, was specifically requested by the boys. When the bus stopped at a refreshment stand, the boys of one group, with several dollars left in their treasury, decided to treat their former bitter adversaries to milkshakes!

We can trace the roots of the surprising turnabout to the times when the boys had to view one another as allies. The crucial procedure was the researcher’s imposition of common goals on the groups. It was the cooperation required to achieve the goals that finally allowed the rival group members to experience one another as reasonable fellows, valued helpers, friends, and friends of friends. When success resulted from the mutual efforts, it became especially difficult to maintain feelings of hostility toward those who had been teammates in the triumph.

Back to School. In the welter of racial tensions that followed school desegregation, certain educational psychologists began to see the relevance to the classroom of Sherif and his coworkers’ findings. If only the learning experience there could be modified to include at least occasional interethnic cooperation toward mutual successes, perhaps cross-group friendships would have a place to grow. Although similar projects have been under way in various states, an especially interesting approach in this direction—termed the jigsaw classroom—was developed by Elliot Aronson and his colleagues in Texas and California.

The essence of the jigsaw route to learning is to require that students work together to master the material to be tested on an upcoming examination. This end is accomplished by grouping students into cooperating teams and giving each student only part of the information—one piece of the puzzle—necessary to pass the test. Under this system, the students must take turns teaching and helping one another. Everyone needs everyone else to do well. Like Sherif’s campers, working on tasks that could be successfully accomplished only jointly, the students become allies rather than adversaries.

Figure 3.5: Mixing together for success

As studies reveal, the jigsaw classroom is an effective way not only to bring about friendship and cooperation among different ethnic groups but also to increase minority students’ self-esteem, liking for school, and test scores.

Nicholas Prior/Stone/Getty Images

When tried in newly desegregated classrooms, the jigsaw approach has generated impressive results. Compared to other classrooms in the same school using the traditional competitive method, jigsaw learning stimulated significantly more friendship and less prejudice among ethnic groups. Besides this vital reduction in hostility, there were other advantages: minority students’ self-esteem, liking for school, and test scores improved. The White students benefited too. Their self-esteem and liking for school went up, and their test performance was at least as high as that of Whites in traditional classes.

There is a tendency when faced with positive results, such as those from the jigsaw classroom, to become overly enthusiastic about a single, simple solution to a difficult problem. Experience tells us such problems rarely yield to a simple remedy. That is no doubt true in this case as well. Even within the boundaries of cooperative learning procedures, the issues are complex. Before we can feel truly comfortable with the jigsaw, or any similar approach to learning and liking, more research is needed to determine how frequently, in what size doses, at which ages, and in which sorts of groups cooperative strategies will work. We also need to know the best way for teachers to institute the new methods—provided they will institute them in the first place. After all, not only are cooperative learning techniques a radical departure from the traditional, familiar routine of most teachers, but they may also threaten teachers’ sense of their own importance in the classroom by turning over much of the instruction to the students. Finally, we must realize that competition has its place too. It can serve as a valuable motivator of desirable action and an important builder of self-concept. The task, then, is not to eliminate academic competition but to break its monopoly in the classroom by introducing regular cooperative experiences that include members of all ethnic groups and lead to successful outcomes.

Consider, for example, the definition of hell and heaven provided by the Judaic teacher Rabbi Haim of Romshishok.

Hell: A sumptuously provisioned banquet hall full of hungry people with locked-strait elbow joints who can’t feed themselves because their unbendable arms won’t allow it.

Heaven: Everything’s the same except people are feeding each other.

Perhaps this account provides a useful way to think about the installation of cooperative techniques in the classroom. They should be selected to maximize the chance that all are nourished by the process. It’s worth noting that as in the rabbi’s illustration, the best acts of cooperation don’t just generate favorable interpersonal feelings; they also produce mutual solutions to shared problems. For instance, research tells us that a bargainer who initiates a handshake at the start of a negotiation signals his or her cooperative intent upfront, which then leads to better financial outcomes for all parties.¹⁴

What’s the point of this digression into the effects of school desegregation in race relations? The point is to make two points. First, although the familiarity produced by contact usually leads to greater liking, the opposite occurs if the contact carries distasteful or threatening experiences with it. Therefore, when children of different racial groups are thrown into the incessant, harsh competition of the standard American classroom, we ought to—and do—see hostilities worsen. Second, the evidence that team-oriented learning is an antidote to this disorder tells us about the heavy impact of cooperation on the liking process.

Before we assume that cooperation is a powerful cause of liking, we should first pass it through what, to my mind, is the acid test: Do compliance practitioners systematically use cooperation to get us to like them so that we will say yes to their requests? Do they point it out when it exists naturally in a situation? Do they try to amplify it when it exists only weakly? And, most instructive of all, do they manufacture it when it isn’t there at all?

As it turns out, cooperation passes the test with flying colors. Compliance professionals are forever attempting to establish that we and they are working for the same goals; that we must “pull together” for mutual benefit; that they are, in essence, our teammates. A host of examples is possible. Most are recognizable, such as new-car salespeople who take our side and “do battle” with their bosses to secure us a good deal. In truth, little in the way of combat takes place when the salesperson enters the manager’s office under such circumstances. Often, because sales professionals know exactly the price below which they cannot go, they and the boss don’t even speak. In one car dealership I infiltrated while researching this book, it was common for a certain salesman, Gary, to have a soft drink or coffee in silence while the boss continued working. After a seemly time, Gary would loosen his tie and return to his customers, looking frazzled and carrying the deal he had just “hammered out” for them—the same deal he had in mind before entering the boss’s office.

A more spectacular illustration occurs in a setting few of us would recognize firsthand, because the professionals are police interrogators whose job is to induce suspects to confess to crime. In recent years, the courts have imposed a variety of restrictions on the way police must behave in handling suspected criminals, especially in seeking confessions. Many procedures that in the past, led to admissions of guilt can no longer be employed for fear they will result in cases being dismissed. As yet, however, the courts have found nothing illegal in the police’s use of subtle psychology. For this reason, criminal interrogators have taken increasingly to the use of such ploys as the one they call Good Cop/Bad Cop.

Good Cop/Bad Cop works as follows: A young robbery suspect—let’s call him Kenny—who has been advised of his rights and is maintaining his innocence, is brought to a room to be questioned by a pair of officers, both male. One of the officers, either because the part suits him or because it is merely his turn, plays the role of Bad Cop. Before the suspect even sits down, Bad Cop curses “the-son-of-a-bitch” for the robbery. For the rest of the session, his words come only with snarls and growls. He kicks the prisoner’s chair to emphasize his points. When he looks at the suspect, he seems to see a mound of garbage. If the suspect challenges Bad Cop’s accusations or just refuses to respond to them, Bad Cop becomes livid. His rage soars. He swears he will do everything possible to assure a maximum sentence. He says he has friends in the district attorney’s office who will hear from him of the suspect’s uncooperative attitude and will prosecute the case hard.

At the outset of Bad Cop’s performance, his partner, Good Cop, sits in the background. Then, slowly, Good Cop starts to chip in. First, he speaks only to Bad Cop, trying to temper the burgeoning anger: “Calm down, Frank, calm down.” But Bad Cop shouts back: “Don’t tell me to calm down when he’s lying right to my face! I hate these lying bastards!” A bit later, Good Cop actually says something on the suspect’s behalf: “Take it easy, Frank, he’s only a kid.” Not much in the way of support, but compared to the rantings of Bad Cop, the words fall like music on the suspect’s ears. Still, Bad Cop is unconvinced: “Kid? He’s no kid. He’s a punk. That’s what he is, a punk. And I’ll tell you something else. He’s over eighteen, and that’s all I need to get his ass sent so far behind bars they’ll need a flashlight to find him.”

Now Good Cop begins to speak directly to the suspect, calling him by his first name and pointing out any positive details of the case: “I’ll tell you, Kenny, you’re lucky nobody was hurt and you weren’t armed. When you come up for sentencing, that’ll look good.” If the suspect persists in claiming innocence, Bad Cop launches into another tirade of curses and threats. This time Good Cop stops him: “Okay, Frank,” handing Bad Cop some money, “I think we could all use some coffee. How about getting us some?”

When Bad Cop is gone, it’s time for Good Cop’s big scene: “Look, man, I don’t know why, but my partner doesn’t like you, and he’s gonna try to get you. And he’s gonna be able to do it, because we’ve got enough evidence right now. And he’s right about the DA’s office going hard on guys who don’t cooperate. You’re looking at five years, man! Now, I don’t want to see that happen to you. So if you admit you robbed that place right now, before he gets back, I’ll take charge of your case and put in a good word for you to the DA. If we work together on this, we can cut the five years down to two, maybe less. Do us both a favor, Kenny. Just tell me how you did it, and let’s start working on getting you through this.” A full confession frequently follows.

Good Cop/Bad Cop works as well as it does for several reasons: the fear of long incarceration is quickly instilled by Bad Cop’s threats; the perceptual contrast principle (see chapter 1) ensures that compared to the raving, venomous Bad Cop, the interrogator playing Good Cop seems like an especially reasonable and kind person; and because Good Cop has intervened repeatedly on the suspect’s behalf—has even spent his own money for a cup of coffee—the reciprocity rule pressures for a return favor. The main reason the technique is effective, though, is that it gives the suspect the idea that there is someone on his side, someone with his welfare in mind, someone working together with him, for him. In most situations, such a cooperator would be viewed very favorably, but in the deep trouble our robbery suspect Kenny finds himself, that person takes on the character of a savior. And from savior, it is but a short step to trusted father confessor.

Conditioning and Association

“Why do they blame me, Doc?” It was the shaky telephone voice of a local TV weatherman. He had been given my number when he called the psychology department at my university to find someone who could answer his question—one that had always puzzled him but had recently begun to bother and depress him.

“I mean, it’s crazy, isn’t it? Everybody knows that I just report the weather, that I don’t order it, right? So how come I get so much flak when the weather’s bad? During the floods last year, I got hate mail! One guy threatened to shoot me if it didn’t stop raining. Hell, I’m still looking over my shoulder from that one. And the people I work with at the station do it, too! Sometimes, right on the air, they’ll zing me about a heat wave or something. They have to know that I’m not responsible, but that doesn’t stop them. Can you help me understand this, Doc? It’s really getting me down.”

We made an appointment to talk in my office, where I tried to explain that he was the victim of an age-old click, run response that people have to things they perceive as merely connected to one another. Although instances of this response abound in modern life, I felt the example most likely to help the distressed weatherman would require a bit of ancient history. I asked him to consider the precarious fate of the imperial messengers of old Persia. Any such messenger assigned the role of military courier had special cause to hope mightily for Persian success on the battlefield. With news of victory in his pouch, he would be treated as a hero upon his arrival at the palace. The food and drink of his choice were provided gladly and lavishly. Should his message tell of military disaster, though, the reception would be quite different: He was summarily slain.

I hoped the point of this story would not be lost on the weatherman. I wanted him to be aware of a fact as true today as it was in the time of ancient Persia: As Shakespeare wrote in Antony and Cleopatra, “The nature of bad news infects the teller.” There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news. The simple association is enough to stimulate our dislike (see figure 3.6, “Weathermen Pay Price for Nature’s Curve Balls”). In a set of eleven studies, someone assigned simply to read aloud a piece of bad news became disliked by its recipients; interestingly, the reader was also seen as having malevolent motives and was rated as a less competent individual. Recall that certain favorable features of a person (for example, physical attractiveness) can produce a “halo effect,” in which the feature causes observers to view the person favorably in all sorts of other ways. It now appears that being the bearer of bad news creates an opposite reaction—something we can call a “horns effect.” Merely communicating negative news affixes to the communicator a pair of devil’s horns that, in the eyes of recipients, apply to various other characteristics.

There was something else I hoped the weatherman would get from the historical example. Not only was he joined in his predicament by centuries of other “tellers,” but also, compared to some (such as the Persian messengers), he was well-off. At the end of our session, he said something to convince me that he appreciated this point. “Doc,” he said on his way out, “I feel a lot better about my job now. I mean, I’m in Phoenix, where the sun shines three hundred days a year, right? Thank God I don’t do the weather in Buffalo.”

The weatherman’s parting comment reveals that he understood more than I had told him about the principle influencing his viewers’ liking for him. Being connected with bad weather does have a negative effect, but being connected with sunshine should do wonders for his popularity. And he was right. The principle of association is a general one, governing both negative and positive connections. An innocent association with either bad things or good things will influence how people feel about us.

Our instruction in the way negative association works seems to have been primarily undertaken by our parents. Remember how they were always warning us against playing with the bad kids down the street? Remember how they said it didn’t matter if we did nothing bad ourselves because, in the eyes of the neighborhood, we would be known by the company we kept? Our parents were teaching us about guilt by association; they were giving us a lesson in the negative side of the principle of association. And they, too, were right. People do assume that we have the same personality traits as our friends’.

Figure 3.6: “Weathermen Pay Price for Nature’s Curve Balls”

Note the similarities of the account of the weatherman who came to my office and those of other TV weather reporters.

David L. Langford, Associated Press

As for the positive associations, it is compliance professionals who teach the lesson. They are incessantly trying to connect themselves or their products with the things we like. Did you ever wonder why good-looking models are hired for all those automobile ads? What advertisers hope they are doing is lending the models’ positive traits—beauty and desirability—to the cars. Advertisers are betting that we will respond to their products in the same ways we respond to the attractive models merely associated with them—and we do.

In one study, men who saw a new-car ad that included a seductive female model rated the car as faster, more appealing, more expensive-looking, and better-designed than did men who viewed the same ad without the model. Yet when asked later, the men refused to believe that the presence of the young woman had influenced their judgments.

Perhaps the most intriguing evidence of the way the association principle can unconsciously stimulate us to part with our money comes from a series of investigations on credit cards and spending. Within modern life, credit cards are a device with a psychologically noteworthy characteristic: they allow us to get the immediate benefits of goods and services while deferring the costs weeks into the future. Consequently, we are more likely to associate credit cards and the insignias, symbols, and logos that represent them with the positive rather than the negative aspects of spending.

Consumer researcher Richard Feinberg wondered what effects the presence of such credit cards and credit-card materials had on our tendencies to spend. In a set of studies, he got some fascinating—and disturbing—results. First, restaurant patrons gave larger tips when paying with a credit card instead of cash. In a second study, college students were willing to spend an average of 29 percent more money for mail-order catalog items when they examined the items in a room that contained some MasterCard logos; moreover, they had no awareness that the credit card insignias were part of the experiment. A final study showed that when asked to contribute to charity (the United Way), college students were markedly more likely to give money if the room they were in contained MasterCard insignias than if it did not (87 percent versus 33 percent). This last finding is simultaneously the most unsettling and instructive concerning the power of the association principle. Even though credit cards themselves were not used for the charity donation, the mere presence of their symbol (with its attendant positive associations) spurred people to spend more cash. This last phenomenon has been replicated in a pair of restaurant studies in which patrons received their bills on tip trays that either did or did not contain credit-card logos. The diners tipped significantly more in the presence of the logos, even when they paid with cash.

Subsequent research by Feinberg strengthens the association explanation for his results. He has found that the presence of credit-card insignias in a room only facilitates spending by people who have had a positive history with credit cards. Those who have had a negative history with the cards—because they’ve paid an above-average number of interest charges in the previous year—do not show the facilitation effect. In fact, these individuals are more conservative in their spending tendencies when in the mere presence of credit-card logos.¹⁵

Because the association process works so well—and so unconsciously—manufacturers regularly rush to link their products to the current cultural rage. As the magic cultural concept has shifted to “naturalness,” the natural bandwagon has become crowded to capacity. Sometimes the connections to naturalness don’t even make sense: “Change your hair color naturally” urges one popular TV ad. Read what one set of scholars had to say on the topic in 2019:

People who prefer items labeled natural are living in a heyday considering the abundance of natural products and services that exist. On a summer day, people could sit on their deck cleaned with Seventh Generation Natural Cleaner and enjoy an Applegate’s Natural Beef Hot Dog in a Vermont Bread Company All Natural Bun smothered in Nature’s Promise Ketchup and Mustard. They could pair the hot dog with Natural Lays Potato Chips and then wash it all down with a Hansen’s Natural Soda. They may even later choose to smoke a Natural American Spirit cigarette while they watch technicians from NaturaLawn of America take care of their lawn. That evening, if they have indigestion, they can take a Naturight Natural Antacid.

During the days of the first American moon shot, everything from breakfast drinks to deodorant was sold with allusions to the American space program; moreover, the perceived value of the connections has stood the test of time: In 2019, on the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing, Omega watches, IBM, and Jimmy Dean Sausage (!) took out full-page ads proclaiming their links to the famous event.

In Olympiad years, we are told precisely the official hair sprays and facial tissue of our Olympic teams. The rights to such associations do not come cheaply. Corporate contributors spend millions to win sponsorships for the Olympics. But this amount pales in comparison to the many millions more these companies then spend to advertise their connection to the event. Yet it may be that the largest dollar figure of all for the corporate sponsors is the one on the profit line. A survey by Advertising Age magazine found that one-third of all consumers would be more likely to purchase an item if it were linked to the Olympics.

Similarly, although it made great sense that sales of Mars rover toys would jump after a US Pathfinder rocket landed the real thing on the red planet in 1997, it made little sense that the same would happen to the popularity of Mars candy bars, which have nothing to do with the space project but are named after the candy company’s founder, Franklin Mars. Sales of the Nissan “Rogue” SUV saw a comparable—and otherwise inexplicable—jump after the 2016 Star Wars film, Rogue One, appeared. In a related effect, researchers have found that promotional signs proclaiming SALE increase purchases (even when there is no actual savings), not simply because shoppers consciously think, “Oh, I can save money here.” Rather, owing to a separate, additional tendency, buying becomes more likely because such signs have been repeatedly associated with good prices in the shoppers’ pasts. Consequently, any product connected to a Sale sign becomes automatically evaluated more favorably.

The linking of celebrities to products is another way advertisers cash in on the association principle. Professional athletes, for example, are paid to connect themselves to things that can be directly relevant to their roles (sports shoes, tennis racquets, golf balls) or wholly irrelevant (soft drinks, popcorn poppers, wristwatches). The important thing for the advertiser is to establish the connection; it doesn’t have to be a logical one, just a positive one. What does Matthew McConaughey really know about Lincolns after all?

Of course, popular entertainers provide another form of desirability that manufacturers have always paid dearly to tie to their goods. More recently, politicians have recognized the ability of a celebrity linkage to sway voters. Presidential candidates assemble stables of well-known nonpolitical figures who either actively participate in or merely lend their names to a campaign. Even at state and local levels, a similar game is played. Take as evidence the comment of a Los Angeles woman I heard expressing her conflicting feelings over a California referendum to eliminate smoking in all public places. “It’s a real tough decision. They’ve got big stars speaking for it, and big stars speaking against it. You don’t know how to vote.”¹⁶

Figure 3.7: Time-honored celebrities

Author’s note: Can you spot the two ways this ad associates Breitling watches with positive entities? The first is obvious: the connection is to attractive, successful celebrities. The second association is less evident but is likely to be effective, nonetheless. Take a look at the position of the ad watch’s hands. It is in the form of a smile. That smile-like configuration, with all its favorable associations, has become the standard in nearly all timepiece ads—for good reason. Arranging a watch’s hands in such a position in an ad leads observers to experience more pleasure in viewing the ad and to express a greater intention to buy the watch (Karim et al., 2017).

Courtesy of Breitling USA, Inc.

While politicians have long strained to associate themselves with the values of motherhood, country, and apple pie, it may be in the last of these connections—to food—that they have been most clever. For instance, it is a White House tradition to try to sway the votes of balking legislators over a meal. It can be a picnic lunch, an extravagant breakfast, or an elegant dinner; but when an important bill is up for grabs, out comes the silverware. Political fundraising these days regularly involves the presentation of food. Notice, too, that at the typical fundraising dinner the speeches and the appeals for further contributions and heightened effort never come before the meal is served, only during or after. There are several advantages to this technique. For example, time is saved and the reciprocity rule is engaged. The least recognized benefit, however, may be the one uncovered in research conducted in the 1930s by the distinguished psychologist Gregory Razran.

Using what he termed the “luncheon technique,” he found that his subjects become fonder of the people and things they experienced while they were eating. In the example most relevant for our purposes, subjects were presented with some political statements they had rated once before. At the end of the experiment, Razran found that only certain of them had gained in approval—those that had been shown while food was being eaten. These changes in liking seem to have occurred unconsciously, as the subjects couldn’t remember which of the statements they had seen while food was being served.

To demonstrate the principle of association also works for unpleasant experiences, Razran included in his experiment a condition in which participants had putrid odors piped into the room while they were shown political slogans. In this case, approval ratings for the slogans declined. Other research indicates that odors so slight that they escape conscious awareness can still be influential. People judged photographed faces as more versus less likable depending on whether they rated the faces while experiencing subliminal pleasant or unpleasant odors.

How did Razran come up with the luncheon technique? What made him think it would work? The answer may lie in the dual scholarly roles he played during his career. He was not only a respected independent researcher but also one of the earliest translators into English of the pioneering psychological literature of Russia. It was a literature dedicated to the study of the association principle and dominated by the thinking of a brilliant man, Ivan Pavlov.

Although a scientist of broad and varied talent—Pavlov had won a Nobel Prize years earlier for his work on the digestive system—his most important experimental demonstration was simplicity itself. He found he could get an animal’s typical response to food (salivation) to be directed toward something irrelevant to food (a bell) merely by connecting the two things in the animal’s experience. If the presentation of food to a dog was always accompanied by the sound of a bell, soon the dog would salivate to the bell alone, even when there was no food to be had.

Figure 3.8: Wait, that sounds like the taste of food.

One of Pavlov’s dogs is pictured with the saliva collection tube used to measure how well its salivation response to food could be shifted (conditioned) to the sound of a bell.

Courtesy of Rklawton

It is not a long step from Pavlov’s classic demonstration to Razran’s luncheon technique. Obviously, a normal reaction to food can be transferred to some other thing through the process of raw association. Razran’s insight was that there are many normal responses to food besides salivation, one of them being a good and favorable feeling. Therefore, it is possible to attach this pleasant feeling, this positive attitude, to anything (political statements being only an example) that is closely associated with good food.

Nor is there a long step from the luncheon technique to the compliance professionals’ realization that all kinds of desirable things can substitute for food in lending their likable qualities to the ideas, products, and people artificially linked to them. In the final analysis, then, that is why those good-looking models stand around in the magazine ads. That is why radio programmers are instructed to insert the station’s call-letters jingle immediately before a big hit song is played. And that is even why the women playing Barnyard Bingo at a Tupperware party must yell the word Tupperware rather than Bingo before they can rush to the center of the floor for a prize. It may be Tupperware for the players, but it’s Bingo! for the company.

Just because we are often unaware victims of compliance practitioners’ use of the association principle doesn’t mean we don’t understand how it works or don’t use it ourselves. There is ample evidence we understand fully the predicament of a Persian imperial messenger or modern-day weatherman announcing the bad news. In fact, we can be counted on to take steps to avoid putting ourselves in any similar positions. Research done at the University of Georgia shows just how we operate when faced with the task of communicating good or bad news. Students waiting for an experiment to begin were given the job of informing a fellow student that an important phone call had come in for him. Half the time the call was supposed to bring good news and half the time, bad news. The researchers found that the students conveyed the information very differently depending on its quality. When the news was positive, the tellers were sure to mention that feature: “You just got a phone call with great news. Better see the experimenter for the details.” When the news was unfavorable, they kept themselves apart from it: “You just got a phone call. Better see the experimenter for the details.” Obviously, the students had previously learned that to be liked, they should connect themselves to good but not bad news.¹⁷

From the News and Weather to the Sports

A lot of strange behavior can be explained by the fact that people understand the association principle well enough to link themselves to positive events and separate themselves from negative events—even when they have not caused the events. Some of the strangest of such behavior takes place in the great arena of sports. The actions of the athletes are not the issue, though. After all, in the heated contact of the game, they are entitled to an occasional eccentric outburst. Instead, it is the often raging, irrational, boundless fervor of sports fans that seems, on its face, so puzzling. How can we account for wild sports riots in Europe, or the murder of players and referees by South American soccer crowds, or the unnecessary lavishness of gifts provided by local fans to already wealthy American ballplayers on the special “day” set aside to honor them? Rationally, none of this makes sense. It’s just a game! Isn’t it?

Hardly. The relationship between sport and earnest fan is anything but gamelike. It is deadly serious. Take, for example, the case of Andres Escobar who, as a member of the Colombian national team, accidentally tipped a ball into his own team’s net during a World Cup soccer match in 1994. The “auto-goal” led to a US team victory and to the elimination of the favored Colombians from the competition. Back home two weeks later, Escobar was executed in a restaurant by two gunmen, who shot him twelve times for his mistake.

So we want our affiliated sports teams to win to prove our own superiority, but to whom are we trying to prove it? Ourselves, certainly, but to everyone else too. According to the association principle, if we can surround ourselves with success we are connected with in even a superficial way (for example, place of residence), our public prestige should rise.

All this tells me we purposefully manipulate the visibility of our connections with winners and losers to make ourselves look good to anyone who views the connections. By showcasing the positive associations and burying the negative ones, we are trying to get observers to think more highly of us and like us more. There are many ways we go about it, but one of the simplest and most pervasive is in the pronouns we use. Have you noticed how often after a home-team victory fans crowd into the range of a TV camera, thrust their index fingers high, and shout, “We’re number one! We’re number one!” Note that the call is not “They’re number one.” The pronoun is we, designed to imply the closest possible identity with the team.

Note also that nothing similar occurs in the case of failure. No TV viewer will ever hear the chant, “We’re in last place! We’re in last place!” Home-team defeats are the times for distancing oneself. Here we is not nearly as preferred as the insulating pronoun they. To prove the point, I once did a small experiment in which students at Arizona State University were phoned and asked to describe the outcome of a football game their school team had played a few weeks earlier. Some of the students were asked the outcome of a certain game their team had lost; the other students were asked the outcome of a different game—one their team had won. My fellow researcher, Avril Thorne, and I simply listened to what was said and recorded the percentage of students who used the word we in their descriptions.

When the results were tabulated, it was obvious that the students had tried to connect themselves to success by using the pronoun we to describe their school-team victory—“We beat Houston, 17 to 14,” or “We won.” In the case of the lost game, however, we was rarely used. Instead, the students used terms designed to keep themselves separate from their defeated team—“They lost to Missouri, 30 to 20,” or “I don’t know the score, but Arizona State got beat.” The twin desires to connect ourselves to winners and to distance ourselves from losers were combined consummately in the remarks of one particular student. After dryly recounting the score of the home-team defeat—“Arizona State lost it, 30 to 20”—he blurted in anguish, “They threw away our chance for a national championship!”

The tendency to trumpet one’s links to victors is not unique to the sports arena. After general elections in Belgium, researchers looked to see how long it took homeowners to remove their lawn signs favoring one or another political party. The better the election result for a party, the longer homeowners wallowed in the positive connection by leaving the signs up

Although the desire to bask in reflected glory exists to a degree in all of us, there seems to be something special about people who would take this normal tendency too far. Just what kind of people are they? In my view, they are not loyal fans who support their teams through good times and bad; they are what we call “fair-weather fans,” who trumpet their association only with winning teams. Unless I miss my guess, they are individuals with a hidden personality flaw: poor self-concept. Deep inside is a sense of low personal worth that directs them to seek prestige not from their own attainments but from their associations with others’ attainments. There are several varieties of this species that bloom throughout our culture. The persistent name-dropper is a classic example. So, too, is the rock-music groupie, who trades sexual favors for the right to tell friends that she or he was “with” a famous musician for a time. No matter which form it takes, the behavior of such individuals shares a similar theme—the rather tragic view of accomplishment as deriving from outside the self.

Figure 3.9: Sports fan(atic)s

Team spirit goes a step beyond wearing the school sweatshirt as these University of Georgia students wear their school letters a different way and cheer their team to victory.

Chris Graythen/Getty Images

READER’S REPORT 3.3

From a movie-studio employee in Los Angeles

Because I work in the industry, I’m a huge film buff. The biggest night of the year for me is the night of the Academy Awards. I even tape the shows so I can replay the acceptance speeches of the artists I really admire. One of my favorite speeches was what Kevin Costner said after his film Dances with Wolves won best picture in 1991. I liked it because he was responding to critics who say that the movies aren’t important. In fact, I liked it so much that I copied it down. But there is one thing about the speech that I never understood before. Here’s what he said about winning the best picture award:

“While it may not be as important as the rest of the world situation, it will always be important to us. My family will never forget what happened here; my Native American brothers and sisters, especially the Lakota Sioux, will never forget, and the people I went to high school with will never forget.”

OK, I get why Kevin Costner would never forget this enormous honor. And I also get why his family would never forget it. And I even get why Native Americans would remember it, since the film is about them. But I never understood why he mentioned the people he went to high school with. Then, I read about how sports fans think they can “bask in the reflected glory” of their hometown stars and teams. And, I realized that it’s the same thing. Everyone who went to school with Kevin Costner would be telling everyone about their connection the day after he won the Oscar, thinking that they would get some prestige out of it even though they had zero to do with the film. They would be right, too, because that’s how it works. You don’t have to be a star to get the glory. Sometimes you only have to be associated with the star somehow. How interesting.

Author’s note: I’ve seen this sort of thing work in my own life when I’ve told architect friends that I was born in the same place as the great Frank Lloyd Wright. Please understand, I can’t even draw a straight line; but I can see a straight line, between me and their hero, taking shape in my friends’ eyes . . . eyes that seem to say, “You and Frank Lloyd Wright?” Wow!”

Certain of these people work the association principle in a slightly different way. Instead of striving to inflate their visible connections to others’ success, they strive to inflate the success of others they are visibly connected to. The clearest illustration is the notorious “stage mother,” obsessed with securing stardom for her child. Of course, women are not alone in this regard. A few years ago, an obstetrician in Davenport, Iowa, cut off service to the wives of three school officials, reportedly because his son had not been given enough playing time in school basketball games. One of the wives was eight months pregnant at the time.¹⁸

Defense

Because liking can be increased by many means, a list of the defenses against compliance professionals who employ the liking rule must, oddly enough, be a short one. It would be pointless to construct a horde of specific counter tactics to combat each of the countless versions of the various ways to influence liking. There are simply too many routes to be blocked effectively with such a one-on-one strategy. Besides, several of the factors leading to liking—physical attractiveness, similarity, familiarity, association—work unconsciously to produce their effects, making it unlikely we could muster a timely protection against them anyway.

Instead, we need to consider a general approach, one that can be applied to any of the liking-related factors to neutralize their unwelcome influence on our decisions. The secret to such an approach lies in its timing. Rather than trying to recognize and prevent the action of liking factors before they have a chance to work, we might want to let them work. Our vigilance should be directed not toward the things that may produce undue liking for a compliance practitioner but toward the fact that undue liking has been produced. The time to call up the defense is when we feel ourselves liking the practitioner more than we should under the circumstances.

By concentrating our attention on the effects rather than the causes, we can avoid the laborious, nearly impossible task of trying to detect and deflect the many psychological influences on liking. Instead, we have to be sensitive to only one thing related to liking in our contacts with compliance practitioners: the feeling that we have come to like the practitioner more quickly or more deeply than we would have expected. Once we notice this feeling, we will have been tipped off that there is probably some tactic being used, and we can start taking the necessary countermeasures. The strategy I am suggesting borrows much from the jujitsu style favored by compliance professionals themselves. We don’t attempt to restrain the influence of the factors that cause liking. Quite the contrary. We allow those factors to exert their force, and then we use that force in our campaign against those who would profit by them. The stronger the force, the more conspicuous it becomes and the more subject to our alerted defenses.

Suppose, we find ourselves bargaining on the price of a new car with Dealin’ Dan, a candidate for Joe Girard’s vacated “Greatest Car Salesman” title. After talking a while and negotiating a bit, Dan wants to close the deal. He wants us to buy the car. Before any decision is made, we should ask ourselves the crucial question, “In the forty-five minutes I’ve known this guy, have I come to like him more than I would have expected?” If the answer is yes, we should reflect on the ways Dan behaved during those few minutes. We might recall that he has fed us (coffee and doughnuts), complimented us on our choice of options and color combinations, made us laugh, and cooperated with us against the sales manager to get us a better deal.

Although such a review of events might be informative, it is not a necessary step in protecting ourselves from the liking rule. Once we discover we have come to like Dan more than we would have expected, we don’t have to know why. The simple recognition of unwarranted liking should be enough to get us to react against it. One possible reaction would be to reverse the process and actively dislike Dan, but that might be unfair to him and contrary to our own interests. After all, some individuals are naturally likable, and Dan might be one of them. It wouldn’t be right to turn automatically against those compliance professionals who happen to be likable. Besides, for our own sakes, we wouldn’t want to shut ourselves off from business interactions with such nice people, especially when they may be offering us a good deal.

I’d recommend a different reaction. If our answer to the crucial question is “Yes, under the circumstances, I like this guy peculiarly well,” this should signal that the time has come for a quick counter-maneuver: Mentally separate Dan from that Chevy or Toyota he’s trying to sell. It is vital to remember at this point that should we choose Dan’s car, we will be driving it, not him, off the dealership lot. It is irrelevant to a wise automobile purchase that we find Dan likable because he is good-looking, claims an interest in our favorite hobby, is funny, or has relatives living where we grew up.

Our proper response, then, is a conscious effort to concentrate exclusively on the merits of the deal and the car Dan has for us. Of course, when we make a compliance decision, it is always a good idea to separate our feelings about the requester from the request. Once immersed in even a brief personal and sociable contact with a requester, however, we may easily forget that distinction. In those instances when we don’t care one way or the other about a requester, forgetting to make the distinction won’t steer us very far wrong. The big mistakes are likely to come when we like the person making the request.

That’s why it is so important to be alert to a sense of undue liking for a compliance practitioner. The recognition of that feeling can serve as our reminder to separate the dealer from the merits of the deal and make our decision based on considerations related only to the latter. Were we all to follow this procedure, I am certain we would be much more pleased with the results—though I suspect Dealin’ Dan would not.

SUMMARY

People prefer to say yes to individuals they like. Recognizing this rule, compliance professionals commonly increase their effectiveness by emphasizing several factors that increase their overall likability.
One such feature is physical attractiveness. Although it has long been suspected that physical beauty provides an advantage in social interaction, research indicates the advantage may be greater than supposed. Physical attractiveness engenders a halo effect that leads to the assignment of other traits such as talent, kindness, and intelligence. As a result, attractive people are more persuasive both in terms of getting what they request and changing others’ attitudes.
A second factor that influences liking and compliance is similarity. We like people who are like us, and we are more willing to say yes to their requests, often in an unthinking manner. Another such factor is praise. Compliments generally enhance liking and, hence, compliance. Two particularly useful types of genuine compliments are those delivered behind the recipient’s back and those selected to give the recipient a reputation to live up to, by continuing to perform the desired behavior.
Increased familiarity through repeated contact with a person or thing is yet another factor that normally facilitates liking. This relationship holds true principally when the contact takes place under positive rather than negative circumstances. One positive circumstance that works especially well is mutual and successful cooperation. A fifth factor linked to liking is association. By connecting themselves or their products with positive things, advertisers, politicians, and merchandisers frequently seek to share in the positivity through the process of association. Other individuals as well (sports fans, for example) appear to recognize the positive effect of simple connections and try to associate themselves with favorable events and distance themselves from unfavorable events in the eyes of observers.
A potentially effective strategy for reducing the unwanted influence of liking on compliance decisions requires sensitivity to the experience of undue liking for a requester. Upon recognizing that we like a requester inordinately well under the circumstances, we should step back from the interaction, mentally separate the requester from his or her offer, and make any compliance decision based solely on the merits of the offer.

Chapter 3

Liking