Do you come to like the people you ask? The Benjamin Franklin effect

"Would you lend me that book?" turned an enemy into an ally

It was 18th-century America. The politician Benjamin Franklin had a fellow member of the legislature who opposed him. Franklin wanted to make peace with this man, but asking him directly seemed likely to backfire.

So Franklin did something unexpected. He heard that the man owned a rare book, and he sent him a letter asking, "Would you be so kind as to lend me that book?" The man gladly lent it to him. When Franklin returned the book, he included a polite thank-you letter, and from then on, the man was friendly toward Franklin.

Franklin 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."

This phenomenon was later named the "Benjamin Franklin effect." It's a psychological effect in which people come to feel goodwill toward those they have helped.

Why do we come to like the people we helped?

This effect goes against intuition. Normally, you would think "I help them because I like them," and "I like them because I helped them" gets the order backward. But the human brain isn't that simple.

In psychology, this is explained as "resolving cognitive dissonance." A contradiction arises between the fact "I was kind to that person" and the feeling "I don't particularly like that person." The brain finds this contradiction uncomfortable and tries to resolve it. Since the action (being kind) can't be changed, it changes the feeling instead. It's thought that the brain automatically rewrites the feeling: "If I was kind to them, I must like them."

This effect is said to have been confirmed in experiments as well. When participants are made to help other participants "because the experimenter asked them to," their liking for the people they helped goes up. They only helped because they were asked, and yet they end up liking them. That's how powerful the brain's urge to make things add up is.

Sending a question means asking someone for a "favor"

Sending a question in a question box is actually asking for a "favor." You are anonymously sending the request "Please answer this question." And if the other person answers, that means "they granted your favor."

In light of the Benjamin Franklin effect, senders tend to feel goodwill toward the person who answered their question. The thought "This person answered my question carefully" leads to "This person is kind," and then to "I like this person." It's thought that this psychological flow works without you being aware of it.

What's even more interesting is that the same effect works on the side answering, too. Answering a question is an act of "helping" the sender. You come to feel goodwill toward the people you helped. In other words, the person answering tends to feel goodwill toward the sender.

The Q&A in a question box works as a system that creates goodwill in both the sender and the person answering. The more you send questions and the more you answer them, the more goodwill you feel toward each other. Here lies the psychological reason a question box works as "a tool for getting closer to your followers."

Relationships start with a "small favor"

The trick to using the Benjamin Franklin effect in everyday life is to start with a "small favor." If you ask for something big right away, the other person feels burdened. But a small favor, like "Could you tell me something real quick?", is something people will readily agree to.

A question in a question box is exactly this kind of "small favor." Answering "What's your favorite food?" doesn't take much effort. But this small exchange becomes the seed of a relationship.

In the world of sales, there's a technique called "foot-in-the-door." First, you get someone to agree to a small request, and then you make a slightly bigger one. Once they have agreed to the small request, a self-image of "someone who is helping this person" forms in their mind, and they become more likely to agree to the next request too.

In a question box, a light question that gets answered is the "first small request" in the relationship between an owner and their followers. As these small exchanges pile up, they eventually grow into a deep, trusting relationship.

The human psychology that Franklin wrote down more than 200 years ago still works the same way in today's question boxes. Sending a question and answering a question both have the power to bring people closer.