psychology Archives - Page 4 of 11

The Ben Franklin Effect

In 1736 Benjamin Franklin was chosen clerk of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. The next year, when he stood again, a new member made a long speech against him, to favor another candidate. Franklin did not try to win the man over with flattery. He heard that the man owned “a certain very scarce & curious Book.” He wrote him a note and asked to borrow it.

The man sent the book at once. Franklin returned it about a week later with a note of thanks. The man then spoke to him for the first time. They stayed friends until the man died. In his Autobiography, Franklin explains it with a maxim: “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”

Mom Was Wrong

Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago and Juliana Schroeder asked commuter train and bus riders to do one of three things. Some were to talk to a stranger. Some were to sit alone. The rest were to do what they normally did. The riders who talked to a stranger “reported having the most positive experience.”

When asked to predict, people “predicted precisely the opposite pattern of experiences.” They “underestimated others’ interest in connecting.” The university announced the study in July 2014 under the headline “Mom was wrong: You should talk to strangers.”

On a First-Name Basis

In May 1967, the psychologist Stanley Milgram described a study in Psychology Today. He sent letters to people in Omaha, Nebraska, and Wichita, Kansas. Each letter had to reach a stranger in the Boston area. A sender could pass it only to someone they knew personally. That person would pass it on in the same way.

In a 1969 follow-up, Jeffrey Travers and Milgram started letters with 296 people in Nebraska and Boston. Knowing someone personally meant knowing them “on a first name basis.” Sixty-four letters reached the target. On average, each passed through 5.2 people on the way.

Receptive Language

In 2020 Michael Yeomans, Julia Minson and colleagues from Harvard and the University of British Columbia published a study of what they called conversational receptiveness. They found that “conversational receptiveness at the beginning of a conversation forestalls conflict escalation at the end.” Wikipedia editors who wrote receptive posts were “less prone to receiving personal attacks from disagreeing editors.”

Receptive language includes “I understand” and “I see your point.” People who followed this recipe “are seen as more desirable partners for future collaboration.”

The Extrovert Ideal

In 2012 Susan Cain published Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. She described an “Extrovert Ideal”: the belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha and comfortable in the spotlight. She called Harvard Business School one of its centers.

In her TED talk the same year, she said: “There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.” The book became a long-running bestseller.

Its success suggests how strong the expectation to speak is, and how many Americans feel its cost.

Half a Minute

In 1993 two Harvard psychologists, Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, published a study called “Half a Minute.” Nine undergraduates watched three 10-second clips of each of 13 college teachers, “with the audio turned down completely.” They rated each teacher on traits such as “confident,” “competent,” “enthusiastic” and “professional.”

Their ratings predicted the evaluations the teachers’ own students gave at the end of the semester. In a later part of the study, even shorter clips still predicted the evaluations.

Conversational Turn-Taking

In 2010 researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Union College published a study of 699 people working in small groups in the journal Science. They found a “general collective intelligence factor” that explained how well a group did across many tasks. It was linked to “the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.”

The lead author, Anita Williams Woolley, said that “in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed.”

Givers, Takers and Matchers

In 2013 Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School, published Give and Take. He sorts people at work into three types. Takers like to get more than they give. Givers pay more attention to what other people need from them. Matchers try “to preserve an equal balance of giving and getting.” Grant puts the share of matchers at about 55 to 60 percent.

One of his examples of a giver is Adam Rifkin, a serial entrepreneur whom Fortune named its best networker in 2011. Rifkin follows a rule he calls the five-minute favor: “You should be willing to do something that will take you five-minutes or less for anybody.”

Specific Goals and “Do Your Best”

In 2002 the psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham reviewed their research on goals in American Psychologist. The article was subtitled “A 35-Year Odyssey.” “We found that specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance than urging people to do their best,” they wrote. They added: “when people are asked to do their best, they do not do so.”

The reason, they explained, is that “do-your-best goals have no external referent and thus are defined idiosyncratically.” This “allows for a wide range of acceptable performance levels, which is not the case when a goal level is specified.” The findings covered “well over 100 different tasks involving more than 40,000 participants” in “at least eight countries.”

Calling In Favors

In his book Influence, first published in 1984, the psychologist Robert Cialdini states the rule of reciprocation: “we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.” He describes an experiment by Dennis Regan of Cornell University. His assistant posed as a subject. He bought some subjects a Coke and later asked them to buy raffle tickets. They bought twice as many as those who got nothing.

Cialdini then turns to Washington. Lyndon Johnson, he writes, produced a remarkable amount of legislation as president “by calling in those favors.” Jimmy Carter had trouble with Congress from the start. Cialdini suggests that much of it may be traced to the fact that “no one there was indebted to him.”