The Benjamin Franklin Effect: A Tool for Sales, & a Confession about How Predictable We All Are

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.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code