2. Liking/Loving Tendency

(For a background behind this series and references/sources used, please view the first article of this series at: https://nitnblogs.blogspot.com/2019/01/series-of-posts-on-psychology-of-human.html )

Charlie says man will generally strive, lifelong, for the affection and approval of many people not related to him. “One very practical consequence of Liking/Loving Tendency is that it acts as a conditioning device that makes the liker or lover tend (l) to ignore faults of and comply with wishes of, the object of his affection, (2) to favor people, producers, and actions merely associated with the object of his affection and (3) to distort other facts to facilitate love.”

The phenomenon of liking and loving causing admiration also works in reverse. Admiration also causes or intensifies liking or love. Amazingly good consequences can come from people likely to trigger extremes of love and admiration boosting each other in a feedback mode. For instance, it is obviously desirable to attract a lot of lovable, admirable people into the teaching profession.

Man who is so constructed that he loves admirable persons and ideas with a special intensity has a huge advantage in life.

My Notes:
It’s hard to take tough but unpleasant decisions due to this tendency. Cialdini says we say yes more often to people we know and like over others. Factors that promote liking are (Cialdini):

• Physical Attractiveness – “Research has shown that we automatically assign to good-looking individuals such favorable traits as talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence.”
• Similarity – “We like people who are similar to us. This fact seems to hold true whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or life-style.”
• Compliments – “…we tend, as a rule, to believe praise and to like those who provide it, oftentimes when it is clearly false.”
• Contact and Cooperation – “…becoming familiar with something through repeated contact doesn’t necessarily cause greater liking. […we must be] working for the same goals…we must ‘pull together’ for mutual benefit.”
• Conditioning and Association – “[Compliance professionals are] incessantly trying to connect themselves or their products with the things we like. Did you ever wonder what all those good-looking models are doing standing around in those automobile ads?”
  

Another thing to remember is that we end up doing a lot of things in our desire to be loved and admired. Many of these things may not be rational. 

Examples:

• The key takeaway I have from this tendency is that if we like someone, we tend to accept and agree with most of that person's ideas. We need to be extra careful in our decision making process when we like someone. Trying to be rational in a love/hate situation is the best way forward (but extremely hard to do in my view).
• An entrepreneur, like any CEO, has to make tough decisions about what her company will do, and those decisions will often run counter to the preferences of her employees. Of course this always backfires: employees also don’t like leaders who don’t make the tough decisions that have to be made. One of these is the firing decision, for example. (Marc)
• We sometimes seek approval for our decisions from our peers and other members of the society. Having high approval ratings does not always mean you are doing the right thing. Some entrepreneurs have emotional resistance to pursuing a strategy that does not meet with immediate approval from press, analysts, and other entrepreneurs. This is worth watching carefully — if everyone agrees right up front that whatever you are doing makes total sense, it probably isn’t a new and radical enough idea to justify a new company. (Marc)
• Physical attractiveness plays a huge role in being liked. I remember reading a news item in which most of the job interview calls went to physically attractive men when photographs were included with a CV. This is also the reason why most of the advertisements we see use attractive models as it combines Influence by mere Association tendency to make a positive impression of the product being advertised.
• It is always easier to purchase an item from someone like you – example: Tupperware party, Amway, insurance agents and other network marketing people. Salespeople use this principle all the time. They try to find something in common with the customer early in interaction. So the next time a salesperson says, “Oh, my brother lives in [your hometown]. I love it there,” — beware. In India this is why use of local language is so much effective in advertising and sales.
• A sales person develops an easy and friendly introduction conversation that gets customers to like them. They help this liking by ensuring they are clean and dress well with nice clothes and expensive watches/glasses to showcase status (we associate status with likability). Likability is a huge form of influence. Successful salespeople are those who are likeable. They smile. They say nice things. They establish like-ability in order to get the sale.
• A lot of customer references on websites is a list of comments from lay people – the people who are very similar to the people who are expected to buy from the website. Customer feedback on Amazon and eBay is so much more powerful than any other advertising.
• Beware of compliments – they trigger likeability.
• This tendency is a huge help for people to have lifelong learning if they are able to “love(s) admirable people and ideas with a special intensity” (Charlie). It generates a virtuous, positive virtuous cycle where a person is able to absorb and learn new ideas throughout his life, reducing the decline of mental abilities with age (Senescence-Misinfluence Tendency).

Many thanks to Anshul Khare, Vikas Kasturi and Prashanth Jnanendra for reading drafts of this and valuable suggestions.