5 Scientific Contradictions That Decide Who You Like
It’s very easy to find out if someone likes you. You just hand them a note that says, “Do you like me? Check yes or no.”
As for whether you like other people, you already know that, of course. And yet, the real dynamics around who you like wind up collapsing into a bunch of paradoxes.
Your Friends Probably Have More Friends Than You Do
You know that some people are more popular than you. They’re so popular that you personally don’t stand a chance of being friends with them at all. As for your own friends, you figure they’re probably approximately as popular as you are. Some may be more popular than you, while others must be less. And if you think your friends are overwhelmingly more popular than you, well, either you’re wrong or you’re notably a loser.
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But in reality, chances are that your friends do have more friends than you. The same is true for any person picked at random.
It doesn’t sound like that makes any sense. Surely people whose friends are more popular than they are and those whose friends are less popular have to balance each other out. But let’s think harder about the numbers here.
Imagine 100 people total. Imagine that most people are friends with 10 others in that group. A couple of the hundred have no friends at all. Meanwhile, a few are very popular and are friends with 50 others, most of whom do not have 50 friends themselves. Perhaps the unpopular people balance out the popular ones, and maybe they even outnumber them. But if we look at any random unpopular person, you (a person also chosen at random) are unlikely to be friends with them, but are likely to be friends with a very popular person, simply because the latter has many more friends.
So, a friend of yours chosen at random is more likely to have 50 friends than 0 friends, and on average, your friends each have more friends than the 10 you have. If we replace those three categories with a gradual range of numbers, the same holds true. It’s only untrue if you’re one of the most popular people, and if we chose you at random, you probably won’t be.
You’ll Like Someone More If You Do Them a Favor, Not Vice Versa
It’s easy to imagine that relationships are transactional. The more you do for someone, the more they come to like you. If you learn about friendships through video games rather than through interacting with humans, you’ll know about doing tasks to “raise your relationship score” with a companion, and the most extreme version of this is people figuring that if you do enough tasks, you’ll eventually get sex, both in video games and in real life.
But here’s an alternate idea people have observed. Actually, someone may come to like you more if they do a favor for you. We call this the Ben Franklin effect because he wrote of using this to win over the affections of a rival legislator. As he put it, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
One explanation for this is that when we do favors for someone, we associate that with being their friend, because we’re more likely to help someone we know and like. Usually, the friendship results in the favor, not the other way around, but in our subconscious, we associate the two together, rather than assigning them a cause and effect. As for how you feel when someone does a favor for you, that surely also endears you to them, but doing a favor will have more an effect in your mind because it involves more action on your part.
In theory, you can put this into practice by asking favors you don’t really want from your many enemies. Though, this might make you a sociopath, as diabolical as Ben Franklin himself.
You’ll Like a Company More If They Get Something Wrong
One step beyond liking someone after helping them, perhaps, would be liking them more after they actively hurt you. And yet, that appears to be what happens with companies or brands — so long as they make good afterward. In fact, you’ll like them more than a company that never screwed up in the first place.
You can explain this attitude, known as the “service recovery paradox,” easily enough. Every company will surely screw up sooner or later. Some of them will then rectify their mistakes, while others never will. You don’t know which way a company will be until they actually do screw up.
However, it still ends up being quite unfair of you. Perhaps that company with a perfect record would have responded well if they ever did make a mistake. But they never did make a mistake, which should earn them extra praise. But instead of appreciating their perfection, you end up preferring the different company with the exact same policy on responding to mistakes, just because they’re worse at their jobs and screw up more.
Birds Hold Grudges Against You, But You Don’t Against Them
As we consider all the various objects of your affection and hatred, let us consider the most important one of all: crows.
You probably can’t tell one crow from another. They all look the same to you. So, if one crow lands on you and rips your hair out by the roots for its nest, you might develop a permanent crow phobia. But you won’t hold a grudge against that exact crow, because you won’t recognize it the next time you see it.
If we look into the mind of the crow, however, we’ll see that a crow can distinguish one human from another. A crow will remember the face of someone who catches it and will fear that face in the future. In one experiment, the catcher wore a Halloween mask, and then the crow feared other people who wore that mask (and not people who wore masks with other faces). This indicates that they look at faces, rather than other features. Then, just to see what would happen, the subjects tried wearing the mask upside-down. The crow now flew upside-down to get a look at the weird face, then flew off in distress.
This research is vitally important, both for understanding that others may perceive us differently than we do them — and for protecting corn.
Everyone Likes You More Than You Think
Let’s go back to that idea of listing out all your friends. Before, we talked about the number of friends you have, and that isn’t really important. Many people who call lots of people their friends aren’t really close to any of them, and a fair number of other people aren’t able to name many friends at all. So, instead, let’s look at however many friends you happen to have and think about how much they like you.
You’ll have trouble quantifying that. But if you could, you’d probably still get it wrong. That’s because tests show people underestimate how much everyone around them likes them.
This is most pronounced when strangers meet for the first time. You might feel anxious on meeting someone new, and you might fixate on something awkward or unimpressive that you said, but the other person probably didn’t notice any of that stuff. They liked you just fine.
There are rare exceptions to this rule — people who overestimate how much everyone likes them. Such people would be complete sociopaths, on par with Benjamin Franklin himself. If that’s you, you have a great career in front of you in politics, so you’re a winner either way.
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