Page 378 - The Social Animal

360 The Social Animal

have suffered. For example, recall the experiment I did in collabora-
tion with Judson Mills in which we found that people who went
through an unpleasant initiation to become members of a group
liked that group better than did those who became members by pay-
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ing a smaller price in terms of time and effort. Where is the re-
ward? The reduction of suffering? The reduction of dissonance? How
does the reward become attached to the group? It is not clear.
Moreover, simply knowing that something is rewarding does not
necessarily help us to predict or understand a person’s behavior. For
example, in Chapters 2, 3, and 5, I analyzed why people conform and
why they change their attitudes, and I discussed several reasons: out
of a desire to win praise, to be liked, to avoid ridicule; out of a desire
to identify with someone whom they respect or admire; out of a de-
sire to be right; or out of a desire to justify their own behavior. In
some way, all of these behaviors make sense, or feel good, or both,
and therefore can be considered rewards. But simply to label them as
rewards tends to obscure the important differences between them.
Although both the desire to be right and the desire to avoid ridicule
produce a state of satisfaction when gratified, the behaviors a person
must employ to gratify these needs are frequently opposite in kind.
For example, in judging the size of a line, a person might conform to
group pressure out of a desire to avoid ridicule, but that same person
might deviate from the unanimous opinion of the other group mem-
bers out of a desire to be right. Little understanding is gained by cov-
ering both behaviors with the blanket term reward. For the social
psychologist, a far more important task is to determine the condi-
tions under which one or the other course of action will be taken.
This point will become clearer as we address some of the research on
interpersonal attraction.

The Effects of Praise and Favors

Recall that Dale Carnegie advised us to “dole out praise lavishly.”
This seems like good old-fashioned common sense: Surely we can
“win friends” by praising our teachers’ ideas or our employees’ efforts.
Indeed, several experiments have shown, in general, that we like peo-
ple who evaluate us positively far more than those who evaluate us
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negatively. But does it always work? Let’s take a closer look. Com-