Page 382 - The Social Animal

364 The Social Animal

resumed his seat. In the other condition, he returned carrying a soft
drink, which he immediately gave to the participant. Subsequently,
each participant was asked to help the stooge perform a dull task. In-
terestingly enough, those students who had not been given the drink
by the stooge were more likely to help him than those who had been
given the drink.
The upshot of this research is that favors and praise are not uni-
versal rewards. For a starving rat or a starving person, a bowl of dry
cereal is a reward, and it is a reward during the day or during the
night, in winter or in summer, if offered by a man or by a woman, and
so on. Similarly, for a drowning person, a rescue launch is a reward
under all circumstances. That is, such rewards are transsituational.
But praise, favors, and the like are not transsituational; whether
they function as rewards depends on situational variations, some of
which can be extremely subtle. Indeed, as we have seen, praise and
favors can even function to make praisers or favor-doers less attrac-
tive than they would have been had they kept their mouths shut or
their hands in their pockets. Thus, Dale Carnegie’s advice is not al-
ways sound. If you want someone to like you, doing a favor as a tech-
nique of ingratiation is indeed risky.
If you want someone to like you, instead of doing her a favor, try
to get her to do you a favor. It turns out that getting someone to do
you a favor is a more certain way of using favors to increase your at-
tractiveness. Recall that, in Chapter 5, I described a phenomenon
called justification of cruelty. Briefly, I pointed out that, if individuals
cause harm to a person, they will attempt to justify their behavior by
derogating the victim. I also analyzed how the justification process
could work in the opposite direction. If I do someone a favor, I will
try to justify this action by convincing myself that the recipient of
this favor is an attractive, likable, deserving person. In effect, I will
say to myself, “Why in the world did I go to all of this effort (or
spend all of this money, or whatever) for Sam? Because Sam is a
wonderful person, that’s why!”
This notion is not new; indeed, it seems to be a part of folk wis-
dom. In 1869, one of the world’s greatest novelists, Leo Tolstoy,
wrote: “We do not love people so much for the good they have done
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us, as for the good we have done them.” A century before Tolstoy’s
observation, Benjamin Franklin used this strategy as a political ploy,
with apparent success. Disturbed by the political opposition and an-