How to get anyone to like you: 16 scientifically proven ways
Steve Carell in “The Office” series
It’s hard to say why you like someone.
Maybe it’s because of his or her goofy smile or razor-sharp mind. Or maybe it’s just because that person is easy to be around. You just like him.
But scientists are usually not satisfied with such answers, and they have been trying for years to identify the specific factors that attract one person to another.
Below we’ve compiled the most intriguing findings. They will help you look at friendship in a new light and teach you how to build a good relationship faster.
1. Copy the behavior of the person you want to like
This strategy is called mirroring and involves subtly imitating the other person’s behavior. When talking to someone, try to copy their body language, gestures and facial expressions.
In 1999, researchers from New York University documented the “chameleon effect,” which occurs when people unconsciously imitate each other’s behavior. This increases sympathy.
The researchers studied the behavior of 72 men and women who worked on a task with a partner. The partners (who worked for the researchers) either mimicked the other participant’s behavior or not, while the researchers recorded their interactions on video. At the end, the researchers asked the participants to indicate how much they liked their partners.
Indeed, participants liked the partners who imitated their own behavior more.
2. Spend more time with people you hope to be friends with
People like people they see often. Here’s one example. Psychologists at the University of Pittsburgh presented four girls as students, but they all came to class a different number of times. When the experimenters showed the male students pictures, they responded more favorably to the girls they saw in class more often – even if they didn’t interact with any of them.
3. Give compliments.
People will associate the adjectives you use to describe other people with your personality. This phenomenon is called spontaneous trait transfer.
A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that this effect occurred even when people realized that these certain traits did not match the people who said so.
According to Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, “What you say about other people affects how people perceive you.
If you describe someone else as sincere and kind, people will associate you with those same qualities. The opposite is also true: if you constantly say nasty things behind people’s backs, your friends will begin to associate negative qualities with you.
4. Try to show positive emotions.
Emotional contagion describes what happens when a person is strongly influenced by the moods of others. According to a research paper by Ohio University and the University of Hawaii, people can unknowingly experience the emotions of others.
The authors of the paper say this is possible because we naturally mimic the movements and facial expressions of others, which in turn makes us feel something similar to how they feel.
If you want others to feel happy to be around you, do everything you can to convey positive emotions to them.
5. Be warm and competent
Princeton University psychologists and their colleagues have proposed a theory that people judge others by their warmth and competence.
According to this model, if you can make yourself seem warm – that is, friendly and non-competitive – people will feel they can trust you. If you seem competent – for example, you have high economic or educational status – they are more likely to respect you.
Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy says it’s important to demonstrate warmth first and then competence, especially in the business world.
“From an evolutionary perspective,” Cuddy writes in her book Presence, “it’s more important for our survival to know whether a person is trustworthy.”
6. Show your flaws from time to time
According to the gaffe effect, people start liking you more after you make a mistake – but only if they think you’re a competent person. Acknowledging that you’re not perfect makes you more sympathetic and vulnerable to the people around you.
Researcher Elliot Aronson of the University of Texas at Austin first discovered this phenomenon when he studied how simple mistakes can affect attractiveness. He asked male students at the University of Minnesota to listen to audio recordings of people taking a quiz.
Students gave higher attractiveness ratings to people who answered the quiz well but spilled coffee at the end of the interview than to those who did well on the quiz but didn’t spill coffee or failed the quiz and spilled coffee.
7. Emphasize shared values
According to Theodore Newcomb’s classic study, people are more attracted to those who are like them. This is known as the similarity attraction effect. In his experiment, Newcomb measured participants’ attitudes toward controversial topics such as sex and politics and then sent them to live together in a house owned by the University of Michigan.
By the end of their time together, the participants liked the housemates with whom they had similar attitudes about the issues being measured more.
Interestingly, a more recent study conducted at the University of Virginia and Washington University in St. Louis found that Air Force recruits related better to each other when they had similar negative personality traits than when they had positive ones.
8. Touch them as if unobtrusively
Unobtrusive touching occurs when you touch a person so subtly that they barely notice. For example, you can swipe your back or touch your arm, which makes the person feel more warm toward you.
In a study conducted in France, young men stood on street corners and talked to women passing by. Success rates were twice as high in those conversations where the men lightly touched the women’s hands, compared to those where they did nothing at all.
An experiment by the University of Mississippi and Rhodes University examined the effect of interpersonal contact on restaurant tipping. The essence of the experiment was that some waitresses lightly touched a customer’s hand or shoulder while giving change. It turned out that these waitresses received significantly more tips than those who did not.
9. Smile
In a University of Wyoming study, nearly 100 female students looked at pictures of another girl in one of four poses: smiling in an open pose, smiling in a closed pose, not smiling in an open pose, or not smiling in a closed pose. The results showed that the girl in the photo elicited the most sympathy when she smiled, regardless of body position.
More recently, researchers from Stanford University and Duisburg-Essen University found that students who interact with each other through avatars feel more positive when there is a wide smile on the avatar.
Another study found that if you smile while meeting someone, it increases the chances of being remembered later.
10. Accept the other person as they want to be seen.
People want to be perceived according to their own ideas about themselves. This phenomenon is described by the theory of introspection. We are all looking for validation of our views, positive or negative.
For a series of studies at Stanford University and the University of Arizona, participants with positive and negative self-perceptions were asked whether they wanted to interact with people who had positive or negative impressions of them.
Participants with positive self-perceptions preferred people who thought highly of them, while participants with negative self-perceptions preferred critics. This may be due to the fact that people like to interact with those who provide feedback according to their identity.
Other studies show that when a person’s perceptions of us match our own, the relationship with them runs more smoothly. This is probably because we feel understood, which is an important component of intimacy.
11. Share secrets.
Openness can be one of the best ways to build a relationship.
In a study conducted by authors from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the California Graduate School of Family Psychology, the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Arizona, college students were split into pairs and given 45 minutes to get to know each other.
Experimenters asked the pairs questions, some of which became increasingly in-depth and personal. For example, one intermediate question was “What is your relationship with your mother?” Other couples were asked simple “chatty” questions. For example, “What’s your favorite holiday? Why?”
At the end of the experiment, students who were asked more personal questions admitted that they felt much closer to each other than students who engaged in small talk.
You can try this technique on your own as you get to know someone. For example, start with simple questions (about the last movie they saw) and then ask about people who mean a lot in their lives. When you share intimate information with others, they are more likely to feel closer to you and want to confide in you in the future.
12. Show that you can keep their secrets, too
Two experiments conducted by researchers from the University of Florida, University of Arizona and Singapore Management University showed that people place a high value on loyalty and trust in relationships.
These two traits proved especially important when people imagined their ideal friend and ideal employee.
As Suzanne Degends-White of Northern Illinois University writes on PsychologyToday.com, “Loyalty has several components, including honesty, reliability, and loyalty, and while each is important for successful relationships, honesty and reliability have been identified as most important in friendships.”
13. Show a sense of humor.
Research conducted at the University of Illinois and the University of California at Los Angeles has shown that whether people think of the perfect friend or romantic partner, a sense of humor is actually important.
Another study conducted by scientists from DePaul University and the University of Illinois found that humor used during the first meeting can make you more likely to like a new acquaintance. The study even found that participating in a humorous task (such as learning to dance blindfolded) increases romantic attraction.
14. Let people talk about themselves
Harvard researchers recently found that telling people about themselves can be as important as food, money, and sex.
In one study, participants answered questions about their own thoughts or other people’s opinions while sitting in an MRI machine. They were also asked to invite a friend or family member to the experiment who was sitting outside the machine. One part of the participants was told that their answers would be shared with a friend or family member, and another part was told that the answers would be confidential.
The results showed that brain areas related to motivation and reward were most active when participants shared information publicly – but were also active when they talked about themselves but no one was listening.
In other words, if you let a person share a story or two about their life instead of talking only about themselves, they will have more positive memories of your communication.
15. Be a little vulnerable
In an article on PsychologyToday.com, Jim Taylor of the University of San Francisco argues that emotional openness — or lack thereof — can explain why two people get along — or don’t get along.
However, Taylor admits:
“Emotional openness, of course, comes with risks, because you become vulnerable and you don’t know whether the person will accept the emotional impact, reciprocate or reject it.”
Perhaps it’s worth the risk – the aforementioned University of Illinois and University of California at Los Angeles study found that expressiveness and openness are desirable and important traits of ideal companions. Whether it’s a romantic partner or a friend.
16. Act like you like the person
Psychologists have long known about a phenomenon called “sympathy reciprocity”: when we think someone likes us, we begin to sympathize with them ourselves.
For example, in a 1959 study published in the Journal of Human Relations, participants were told that some members of a group discussion were likely to like them. These group members were chosen at random by the experimenter.
After the discussion, participants indicated that they liked those people most who supposedly sympathized with them.
More recently, researchers from the University of Waterloo and the University of Manitoba found that when we expect people to accept us, we treat them more warmly – thereby increasing their chances of actually liking us. So even if you’re not sure how the person you’re talking to feels about you, act like you like them and they’ll respond in kind.
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March 27, 2019 Business Insider
7 psychological tricks you can use to make anyone fall in love with you
Getting into an unfamiliar team, just starting a new job, but don’t want to feel uncomfortable interacting with people? Then use these tips to please everyone at once.
There are a few tricks that will help to make people like you and make them like you. So the next time you feel uncomfortable in a new company, just resort to these psychological tricks that are sure to work. You can make anyone fall in love with you with these tricks.
With people smiling at us, we psychologically relax, feel more comfortable, more relaxed. Photo © Shutterstock
Trite, boring, but it really works. Consciously or not, people absolutely always follow the smiles of their interlocutors. It has been proven that with people who smile at us, we psychologically relax, feel more comfortable and relaxed. Agree, you always want to go back to the person with whom it is easy and pleasant.
Copy the gestures of your interlocutors
Another psychological technique aimed at non-verbal reading of you by the interlocutor. Our brain is always alert, even when we do not notice it, it is constantly scanning the space and people around for danger. But if it understands that the person soon begins to repeat after you the posture, gestures, perhaps some words, then subconsciously takes for friendly and sympathetic. Therefore, if you want to please, do not forget to copy sometimes the gestures of people you are interested in.
Raise your eyebrows more often.
Along with a smile while communicating with a person you want to like, it is very important to watch your eyebrows. Incredible, but true. The raised eyebrows in the middle of the dialogue will show the interlocutor that you are interested in communication; his words are something new and surprising to you, or familiar and understandable. Just don’t overdo it. If you get carried away and constantly raise your eyebrows, the person will consider such a gesture as sarcasm on your part.
Don’t be stingy with your praise.
The first impression is always the strongest, you should try to please the interlocutor at the moment of acquaintance. Photo © Shutterstock
What kind of people do we all like? Of course, those who praise us. So don’t be stingy with compliments during the first meeting. The first impression is always the strongest, you should try to please the person you are talking to at the moment of acquaintance. Just do not impose with praise and do not go into outright flattery, and then it is immediately visible.
Share something personal.
This does not mean that you should immediately spill your innermost feelings on the person or give away secrets. No, but it’s been proven that by revealing a little personal information, it’s easier to start a relationship and get the person to like you. You can begin with general topics, such as a modest talk about the book you’ve read, or a movie that the interlocutor has also seen. Then you can tell about something personal – such a psychological method will help the interlocutor to understand that you are an open person and you can be trusted.
Give the person a chance to talk about himself or herself
If you want a person to like you and get them to like you, ask them to talk about themselves. Photo © Shutterstock
We’re all selfish to some degree, which is why we like to praise our own selves so much. Researchers at Harvard University have found that we enjoy talking about ourselves as much as we enjoy having sex or counting the money we earn. So if you want to please someone and get them to like you, deliberately ask them something that will motivate them to talk about themselves.
Deliberately trip, spill coffee on the table, drop something on the floor. In general, visually show the person next to you that you are not perfect. Such a small psychological manipulation will help his companion to feel next to you more confident, and thus open up to him will not be afraid. A technique that always works.
