Page 380 - The Social Animal

362 The Social Animal

knows it. The boss comes along and uses the same phrase in exactly
the same tone of voice. Will that phrase function as a reward in this
situation? I am not sure. Nancy may interpret the statement as her
boss’s attempt to be encouraging and nice, even in the face of a poor
performance; because of the boss’s display of thoughtfulness, Nancy
may come to like him even more than she would have had she, in
fact, done a good job. On the other hand, Nancy may attribute all
kinds of characteristics or ulterior motives to her boss: She may con-
clude that her boss is being sarcastic, manipulative, dishonest,
nondiscriminating, patronizing, seductive, or stupid—any one of
which could reduce Nancy’s liking for him. A general reward-cost
theory loses a good deal of its value if our definition of what consti-
tutes a reward is not clear. As situations become complex, we find
that such general notions decrease in value because a slight change
in the social context in which the reward is provided can change a
reward into a punishment.
Research in this area indicates that, although people like to be
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praised and tend to like the praiser, they also dislike being manip-
ulated. If the praise is too lavish, it seems unwarranted, or (most im-
portant) if the praiser is in a position to benefit from the ingratiating
behavior, then he or she is not liked very much. In an experiment by
Edward Jones, an accomplice observed a young woman being inter-
viewed and then proceeded to evaluate her. The evaluations were
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prearranged so that some women heard a positive evaluation, some
heard a negative evaluation, and some heard a neutral evaluation. In
one experimental condition, the evaluator might have had an ulterior
motive. In this condition, participants were informed in advance that
the evaluator was a graduate student who needed participants for her
own experiment and would be asking the students to volunteer. The
results showed that the students liked the evaluators who praised
them better than those who provided them with a negative evalua-
tion, but there was a sharp drop in their liking for the praiser with
the possible ulterior motive. Thus the old adage “flattery will get you
nowhere” is clearly wrong. As Jones put it, “flattery will get you some-
where”—but not everywhere.
By the same token, we like people who do us favors. Favors can
be considered rewards, and we tend to like people who provide us
with this kind of reward. For example, in a classic study of inmates
in a women’s reformatory, Helen Hall Jennings found that the most