Page 381 - The Social Animal

Liking, Loving, and Interpersonal Sensitivity 363

popular women were those who initiated new and interesting activ-
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ities and helped others become a part of those activities. Our lik-
ing for people who do us favors extends even to situations in which
these favors are not intentional. This was demonstrated by Bernice
and Albert Lott in an experiment with young children. 16 The re-
searchers organized children into groups of three for the purpose of
playing a game that consisted of choosing various pathways on a
board. Those who were lucky enough to choose the safe pathways
won the game; making the wrong choice led to disaster.The children
were, in effect, walking single file in an imaginary mine field, whose
mines remained active even after they exploded. If the child at the
front of the line chose the wrong path, that player was “blown up”
(out of the game), and the child next in line would, of course, choose
a different path. Leaders who happened to choose correctly led the
others to a successful completion of the game. The results indicated
that those children who were rewarded (by arriving safely at the goal)
showed a greater liking for their teammates (who, of course, had been
instrumental in helping them achieve the reward) than did those
children who did not reach the final goal. In short, we like people
who contribute to our victory more than those who do not, even if
they had no intention of doing us a favor.
But, as with those who praise us, we do not always like people
who do favors for us; specifically, we do not like people whose favors
seem to have strings attached to them. Such strings constitute a
threat to the freedom of the receiver. People do not like to receive a
gift if a gift is expected in return; moreover, people do not like to re-
ceive favors from individuals who are in a position to benefit from
those favors. Recall the example I mentioned in a previous chapter:
If you were a teacher, you might enjoy receiving gifts from your stu-
dents. On the other hand, you might be made pretty uncomfortable
if a borderline student presented you with an expensive gift just be-
fore you were about to grade his or her term paper. Strong support
for this reasoning comes from an experiment by Jack Brehm and Ann
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Cole. In this experiment, college students were asked to participate
in a study (characterized by the experimenters as important) in
which they would be giving their first impressions of another person.
As each student was waiting for the experiment to begin, the other
person (actually a stooge) asked permission to leave the room for a
few moments. In one condition, he simply returned after a while and