This concept is
complicated and rarely well understood on first encounter. Once mastered, however, it becomes an
invaluable tool in sales and in building genuine relationships.
Every serious discussion
begins with definitions. Definitions set
the parameters of what is actually being discussed, and establish shared
understanding before anything else gets built on top of it. Imam Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad
al-Ghazali, the Persian theologian, observed, to the effect, that before
speaking of a cup, one should first understand what a cup is. What follows here is considerably more
complicated than a cup.
The Benjamin Franklin
Effect is a proposed psychological phenomenon, a form of cognitive
dissonance. In essence, when people do
us a favour, they become more likely to hold a favourable opinion of us. The intuitive assumption runs the other way:
people do favours because they already like us, and that may hold in some
cases. In business, however, the
causation frequently runs in reverse.
People come to like us precisely because of the favours we induce them
to perform on our behalf.
Leon Festinger, the
American social psychologist, formalised the underlying mechanism in his 1957
theory of cognitive dissonance, arguing that people experience genuine
psychological discomfort when their actions contradict their existing
attitudes, and resolve that discomfort by adjusting the attitude rather than
undoing the action. A person who has
already done you a favour cannot easily continue disliking you, because
disliking someone he has just helped creates exactly the discomfort Festinger
described. Adjusting the opinion is
simply easier than confronting the contradiction.
The effect takes its name
from Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, who
wrote in his autobiography, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more
ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.” Franklin illustrated this with an account of
a rival legislator during his service in the Pennsylvania legislature in the
eighteenth century. Learning the man
owned a scarce and curious book, Franklin wrote requesting to borrow it. The book arrived immediately. Franklin returned it within a week,
accompanied by a note expressing genuine appreciation. At their next meeting in the House, the
legislator, who had never previously spoken to Franklin, addressed him with
unexpected civility, and remained willing to assist him on every subsequent
occasion. Their friendship, by Franklin’s
own account, lasted until the man’s death.
Anyone who has read
Franklin’s biography in full knows he was not, by most measures, an especially
likeable man. He drank to excess on
occasion, pursued numerous romantic entanglements, boasted more than modesty
allowed, and could not keep a confidence to save his own reputation, a flaw so
pronounced that his own government deliberately withheld sensitive information
from him. And yet he was widely liked,
across an entire political career, largely through mechanisms exactly like this
one. If a man with Franklin’s
considerable personal flaws could engineer genuine goodwill this reliably, the
technique itself deserves serious attention rather than dismissal as a parlour
trick.
Application
This principle applies
across three domains: networking, prospecting for clients, and closing a deal
or completing a negotiation. Between
them, these three scenarios cover nearly every situation a person is likely to
encounter professionally.
Networking happens
constantly, whether consciously recognised or not. Even the most solitary person requires
validation from at least one other human being, a basic feature of gregarious
social creatures. Prospecting is where a
person markets himself, present in nearly every social interaction whether
framed that way or not. Closing the deal
is where genuine accord gets reached on any outstanding issue.
Scenario:
Networking
Networking, in this
context, means meeting new people in specific settings, at events, and
increasingly in non-physical, digital environments. How and where those meetings happen matters
considerably.
Every person wants
recognition, wants to feel elevated.
That flattery, however, must feel sincere. Insincere flattery breeds hostility, because
people instinctively grow suspicious of unearned praise. Applying the Franklin Effect requires
cultivating the habit of requesting small, innocuous favours first. Smokers borrowing cigarettes or a lighter from
strangers illustrate this precisely. The
bond only forms, however, if the item is returned. Failing to return it converts the exchange
from a bond-building gesture into simple taking, and the psychological
mechanism collapses entirely. People
resolve dissonance between their thoughts, attitudes, and actions by
rationalising: having done a favour, they conclude they must like the
recipient, and adjust their attitude to match the action already taken.
The reverse mechanism
deserves equal attention. Doing a favour
for someone who already dislikes you tends to deepen the dislike rather than
repair it, because the recipient feels burdened by an unwanted obligation rather
than warmed by generosity. This creates
distance, not closeness. It explains the
instinctive suspicion many people feel toward those who appear excessively
generous without an obvious motive.
Unprompted giving strikes most people as unnatural, and that discomfort
is set aside reliably only in narrow circumstances, religious giving among
them, where the power dynamic quietly inverts: the giver gives precisely to
receive more in return later, a transaction dressed convincingly enough that
conscience does not object.
Scenario:
Prospecting
Prospecting occurs in
corporate settings, across social networks, and at public events alike, and
understanding the psychology of favours matters here just as much. Performing a favour does not, on its own,
create closeness. A single major favour
for a friend produces genuine gratitude.
Constant, repeated favours produce resentment instead, because the
underlying power dynamic becomes impossible to ignore, and nobody enjoys
feeling perpetually indebted or helpless.
In any setting with an
audience present, the other party must be made to feel he holds the advantage
in the relationship’s power dynamic. The
actual objective is never to demonstrate superiority. It is to achieve the outcome sought. Requesting a favour, properly framed, creates
the illusion that the other person occupies the higher position, while the
genuine intent is building a favourable impression and, ultimately, genuine
liking. Illusion, deployed carefully,
serves the underlying reality.
What, specifically, can
be “borrowed” from a prospect? Nothing
physical is required. Credibility can be
borrowed by quoting someone directly.
Achievements can be borrowed simply by remembering them accurately,
correctly recalling who delivered which speech, who accomplished what, and
when. People crave that fleeting form of
immortality, being properly acknowledged and correctly remembered. Providing it, convincingly, is the actual
mechanism at work, whether or not the sincerity behind it is entirely genuine.
Scenario:
Succeeding
Just as failure requires
planning, success requires equally deliberate planning: getting the deal over
the line, addressing hesitation directly, and ensuring the other party believes
the outcome was their own idea. That
final element carries disproportionate weight.
Consider how frequently interpersonal friction stems from exactly this
failure to let someone feel ownership of a decision.
The Franklin Effect
resolves tension precisely because some degree of hesitation accompanies almost
every significant agreement, particularly where large sums are involved, and
cold feet are a genuine risk.
Manufacturing the right cognitive dissonance forces the issue toward
resolution. Once someone has convinced
himself he likes you, and that the decision was genuinely his own, reversing
course means contradicting himself, which people resist instinctively.
Shaping the conversation
to plant that ownership, framing the outcome as being in the other party’s own
interest, driven by the other party’s own initiative, works reliably because
most people, most of the time, do not have a firm grasp on what they actually
want or what genuinely serves their own interest. National politics demonstrates this mechanism
at a considerably larger scale, and with considerably higher stakes. President George W. Bush, following his
narrow 2004 re-election victory, a margin of roughly 2.4 percentage points in
the popular vote, declared, “I earned capital in this campaign, political
capital, and now I intend to spend it,” proceeding to pursue policy priorities,
including Social Security privatisation, that had barely featured in the
campaign itself. The electorate had
voted for a candidate and a party. The
winning side proclaimed a sweeping mandate regardless, and pursued its
pre-existing agenda under that banner.
Executed skilfully, the electorate remains convinced this was precisely
what it voted for all along.
In Closing
What has been covered
here is only an introduction to the Benjamin Franklin Effect, and a handful of
suggested applications within a selling context. The deeper lesson sits beneath the technique
itself. The more thoroughly human
psychology is understood, the more apparent it becomes that people are
remarkably predictable, and correspondingly susceptible to deliberate
influence. Understanding precisely how
this phenomenon operates is inseparable from recognising how often it has
already been used on each of us, for better reasons and for considerably worse
ones.
Terence Nunis |
Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The
Billionaire Cheat Code
