The Ben Franklin Effect

Or why we sometimes grow fonder of the people we've helped

From the "Our Everyday Mind" series

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There's a colleague you've never really gotten along with. Nothing serious — just a polite coolness, a few remarks that struck you as arrogant, an impression that settled in and stayed there. One day, he stops you in the hallway and asks, a little awkwardly, for your help with something: a presentation that won't open, a text to read before a meeting, a heavy box to carry to his car. You agree, without much enthusiasm.

And then you notice something strange. Over the next few days, you see him differently. A little more warmly. He doesn't seem quite so arrogant anymore. He didn't do anything special for you. You did something for him.

Something shifted. But not in him.

The rare book Franklin asked to borrow

The phenomenon takes its name from a story Benjamin Franklin tells in his Autobiography . In 1736, Franklin had been chosen clerk of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. The following year, when he stood for the post again, a new member of the Assembly — a wealthy, educated, influential man whom Franklin does not name — gave a long speech against him.

Franklin did not try to win him over with flattery or servility, as he himself puts it. Instead, he learned that the man had a very scarce and curious book in his library and wrote to him, asking to borrow it for a few days. His opponent sent it immediately. Franklin returned it about a week later, with a note of thanks.

The next time they met in the House, the man spoke to him — something he had never done before — and with great civility. From then on he was always ready to help Franklin, and the two remained friends until the man's death. Franklin sums it up with a maxim he says he had learned long before: "He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged."

The observation runs against intuition. We would expect people to grow fond of those who do them good. Franklin suggests that the bond is built, at least sometimes, in the opposite direction.

The money asked back

More than two centuries later, in 1969, psychologists Jon Jecker and David Landy brought Franklin's maxim into the laboratory, in a study published in the journal Human Relations under the title Liking a Person as a Function of Doing Him a Favour.

Participants took part in a skill game in which they won money. At the end, some of them were approached by the researcher himself, who explained, embarrassed, that he had paid the money out of his own pocket, that his funds had run out, and that it would help him if they gave it back. Others were asked by the department secretary to return the money to the department's research fund. A third group kept the money, with no request at all.

Then everyone filled out a questionnaire saying how likeable they had found the researcher. Those whom the researcher had personally asked to do him this favor later rated him more favorably than participants in the other conditions.

The same man, the same interaction, the same money. The only difference was that some of the participants had helped him.

What the mind is trying to put in order

The classic explanation comes from the theory of cognitive dissonance, formulated by Leon Festinger in 1957: we feel uncomfortable when our behavior doesn't match what we believe or feel, and we tend to reduce the tension by adjusting one side. If we've done a kindness for someone we don't like, a small mismatch opens up between the gesture and the feeling. The gesture can't be changed — it has already happened. The feeling, however, can be adjusted, quietly: he probably isn't that bad, if I helped him..

A related reading comes from self-perception theory, proposed by Daryl Bem in the late 1960s: sometimes we don't know our attitudes from the inside, but infer them, like an outside observer, from our own behavior. I see myself helping someone and conclude, without ever putting the thought into words, that I must care about them a little.

There is also a third explanation, less mechanical and perhaps warmer. A study published in 2016 by Yu Niiya in Journal of Social Psychologysuggests that part of the effect may come from the request itself: being asked for help sends a signal of trust and a wish for closeness, and we tend to respond with liking to those who seem to want us around. Niiya links the idea to the Japanese concept of amae — the comfort of a relationship in which you can allow yourself to depend on the other person. In this reading, it isn't only the act of helping that brings us closer. It's also the fact that someone trusted us enough to ask.

Probably none of these explanations covers the whole phenomenon on its own. And, as we'll see, the phenomenon itself isn't as simple as internet advice has made it.

From the office hallway to the neighbor on the third floor

You don't need a lab to recognize the pattern.

You find it in the attachment you feel toward a friend you helped move, even though the day was long and hard. In the way a mentor comes to care for the student they've invested time in — sometimes more than for the one who never asked for anything. And there is something related — though it is not the same phenomenon — in the care we come to feel for a plant, an animal, or a project we've looked after from the start. Here you can also see the kinship with the IKEA effect, which I wrote about in an earlier article in this series: we value more what we've built ourselves. Sometimes, what we build is a relationship.

I tend to notice the effect most in the direction I'm not looking for it. By nature, I'm more comfortable in the position of the one who gives than of the one who asks. For a long time I believed that if I didn't ask for anything, I wouldn't bother anyone. Yet the relationships that truly deepened in my life almost all passed through a moment when I had to ask for something — an opinion, a ride, an evening of listening. It wasn't their gesture that brought us closer. It was that, finally, I had left them room to make one.

If you never ask for anything, you don't bother anyone. But you don't let anyone come close, either.

Where the effect is more fragile than it seems

Here things get more complicated, and it's worth saying so openly.

First, the direct evidence is thinner than the popularity of the term would suggest. Jecker and Landy's study was conducted with a small number of participants, and the Ben Franklin effect, as such, has not gone through the large replication projects that other famous phenomena in social psychology have faced. The general mechanism it rests on — cognitive dissonance — has a rich literature. But the precise story, "get them to help you and they'll like you," rests largely on an eighteenth-century anecdote and a handful of old experiments.

Second, context matters enormously. In the 1969 experiment, the effect appeared when the favor was asked personally, by the researcher himself, and granted willingly. A favor extracted under pressure, asked too often, or perceived as exploitation is more likely to produce resentment than liking. Dissonance can resolve in the other direction too: I helped him because I had no choice, and he took advantage..

And, perhaps most importantly, the mechanism has a dark side. If we do good to someone, we tend to see them in a better light; if we harm someone, we tend to see them in a worse one. A classic study by Keith Davis and Edward Jones, published in 1960, showed that people who had been made to criticize another person harshly later came to evaluate that person more negatively, as if the mind were trying to justify, after the fact, what they had done. The same need for consistency that can bring us closer to an opponent can, just as quietly, push us away from someone we've hurt.

That's why the popular versions of the effect — "the psychological trick that makes anyone like you" — miss exactly the point. Turned into a manipulation technique, the gesture loses precisely what made it work: the real trust behind the request.

What we underestimate when we don't ask

Perhaps the most useful part of this story isn't about liking, but about how hard it is for us to ask.

A study published in 2008 by Francis Flynn and Vanessa Lake, If You Need Help, Just Askshowed that people systematically underestimate how willing others are to help them — in their experiments, participants underestimated by as much as roughly 50% how many people would agree to a direct request for help. And in 2022, Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley showed, in Psychological Science, that those who ask for help underestimate both how willing helpers are and how good they feel, and overestimate how inconvenienced they will be.

We put up, in other words, a barrier between ourselves and others made largely of assumptions. We fear being a burden, while the other person might have experienced the joy of being useful.

The next time you hesitate to ask

There's no need to turn the Ben Franklin effect into a strategy. Nobody needs a list of small favors to request from difficult colleagues.

Perhaps it's enough to notice, the next time you catch yourself caring more for someone you've helped, that the affection was born, at least in part, in you — from your own gesture. And, the next time you hesitate to ask for something, to remember that a request isn't only a cost to the other person. It can also be an invitation.

Franklin asked for a book. Along with the request, his opponent received the chance to be generous — and, perhaps, to see himself differently.

Perhaps the question isn't how we get others to like us. Perhaps it's how much room we actually leave them to give us something.

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If you feel you want to explore more of what is happening in your emotional life, there is a space for that.

L’esprit de l’escalier

Déjà vu – I’ve lived this moment before.