Page 384 - The Social Animal

366 The Social Animal

into doing a special favor for the experimenter liked him best; that
is, because they did him a favor, they succeeded in convincing them-
selves that he was a decent, deserving fellow.
Similar results were obtained in an experiment by Melvin Lerner
and Carolyn Simmons in which groups of participants were allowed
to observe a student who appeared to be receiving a series of electric
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shocks as part of an experiment in learning. After watching for a
while, some participants were allowed to vote, by private ballot, on
whether the “victim” should continue to receive electric shocks. Oth-
ers were not allowed to vote on this procedure. All those who were
allowed to vote did, indeed, vote for the termination of the shocks;
some of the voting participants succeeded in terminating the shocks,
while others did not.Those people who succeeded in terminating the
shocks came to like the victim the most. The people who tried but
failed to terminate the shocks liked him about as much as those who
didn’t vote at all.

Personal Attributes
As I have already mentioned, several personal characteristics play an
important role in determining the extent to which a person will be
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liked. When individuals are asked in a public opinion poll to de-
scribe the attributes of people they like, they list qualities such as sin-
cere, competent, intelligent, energetic, and so on. But in studies of
this sort, it is difficult to establish the direction of causality: Do we
like people who have pleasant attributes or do we convince ourselves
that our friends have pleasant attributes? Chances are that causality
flows in both directions. To be sure that people with certain positive
personal attributes are liked better than others, however, it is neces-
sary to examine this relation under more controlled conditions than
exist in the opinion poll. In this section, we will closely examine two
of the most important personal attributes: competence and physical
attractiveness.

Competence It would seem obvious that, all other things being
equal, the more competent an individual is, the more we will like that
person.This is probably because we have a need to be right; we stand
a better chance of being right if we surround ourselves with highly