5 Insignificant Things That Determine if Someone Likes You

Studies show that if you really want people to like you as a person, you're actually better off ignoring their pleas of help and making them do favors for you instead ... and just remember to really go over the top in thanking them for it. It sounds crazy, but it has to do with how people don't like feeling that they owe you something, but like feeling that you owe them.

See, the problem with doing minor nice things for somebody is that they forget about it much faster than the person doing the favor. A few days later, the girl has long forgotten the coffee, and the guy quickly gets annoyed that she didn't appreciate it enough. A month later, he's all "BUT I GAVE YOU THAT COFFEE! You owe me at least a hug!" While the value of the gift decreases in the recipient's mind, it actually gets inflated in the giver's mind, until he's equating it with having fought a bear for her. Here it is in graph form:

So it actually drives a wedge between you; the innocent favor turns into kind of a power play. Which brings us to the weird, opposite corollary of this rule, and it comes courtesy of none other than Benjamin freakin' Franklin.

In fact, it's even called the Ben Franklin effect, after an offhanded quip he once made regarding the favorer/favoree relationship. It goes like this: If you can convince a person who doesn't really think much of you to do a favor for you -- even a small one -- this tricks him into suddenly believing that he now likes you. All you need to do is remember to thank him enough.

As we just established above, nobody likes feeling like they're indebted to somebody else, and this is the opposite -- it continually reminds the other person of how much you're in their debt. And science says that people love it. In one experiment, participants who were given money and then asked personally to give it back were more likely to like the researcher than those who got to keep the cash. Do you ever watch old episodes of Seinfeld and wonder how they put up with Kramer, who was always eating Jerry's food and borrowing stuff? This is why: The fact that he was always on the receiving end made him lovable.

Everyone who has seen a movie about high school, or actually attended one, knows that most of the popular kids are also usually complete and utter dicks. It stands to reason: Being popular has a way of increasing your hat size, and the students who find themselves on top of the social ladder comprised of confused, hormone-addled kids can find it difficult to resist dropping things on the people below. It's just an unfortunate byproduct of that particular and particularly weird period in life -- it's not as if the popular kids are popular because they're nasty.

Or so you'd think. Several studies have indeed proven that the best way to gain popularity in high school is by acting like a total asshole.

In one study, researchers followed about 4,000 high schoolers and tracked their relationships, behavior and level on the social ladder. They found that as the kids rose up the ladder, so did their bullying of the others. And the curious thing was that the asshole kids just kept on rising despite their antics. So why do the other kids keep licking the boots of the people who keep kicking them with said boots?

If you went to high school, you already know the answer: Because acting like a dick is a sign of confidence. Picking on others makes you look like a leader. Society feeds us bully archetypes like Donald Trump and Gordon Ramsay as winners and entrepreneurial geniuses all the time. By extension of that logic, it's easy to view the big jock who spat in your water bottle as one, too.

However, there are popularity heights that even the most dickish quarterback or bitchiest cheerleader cannot reach. At the very top of the ladder, the level of bullying drops off completely. The absolute most popular kids don't bully at all, because they don't need to. Or rather, they're just far too narcissistic to care. It turns out that the most popular high schoolers are the ones so obsessed with their own selves, it's practically dripping off them. The other students mistake their aloof, entitled behavior as personal, innate charm and worship the ground under the narcissists' feet. Because if there's anything cooler than the guy who pulled your underwear up your ass, it's the one who was too busy staring into his locker mirror to even notice.

And it's not that the labels just make us think of the wearers as wealthy or stylish; it actually makes us trust them more as people. What the hell?

On one hand, the labels are doing exactly what the manufacturers hoped they would, only to a much greater (and crazier) degree: We're told that the brand is high quality, so the man who knows to buy it must have great judgment. But it's a trap we fall into due to evolution.

The problem is that for most animals, other members of the species can tell at a glance how healthy/fertile/awesome they are -- a peacock with perfect feathers can only get them by being a healthy specimen. Humans are different -- with our clothes and makeup and talent for bullshit, we don't have any of those easy "Is this guy awesome?" shortcuts that can be spotted at a glance. But we want them very badly -- life would sure be a hell of a lot easier if people just had "trustworthy" stamped on their chest.

So, in the absence of that, we just pick the people who spend twice as much on their clothing based on a brand name. Makes sense.

As the more perceptive Internet user may have noticed, during the last few years, a little site called Facebook has hatched into a giant social behemoth that envelops pretty much everything we do. It has become so big that you're actually considered suspicious if you don't have a profile. One neat aspect of Facebook is that within the limits of your privacy settings, anyone can see pictures of not only you, but also all your friends -- something a person with a non-stalker mindset can't do when meeting you in real life. Still, that's just icing, right? It's not as if anyone cares who your friends are.

Wrong. Your friends do matter, and people can and absolutely will determine how much they like you because of them. Or rather, what they look like.

To test this, researchers set up a little experiment. They took two average-looking people -- a man and a woman -- and made them two Facebook profiles each. The profiles were identical save for one thing: What the person's friends looked like. One profile had a bunch of pictures of pretty friends and their pretty profile pics, while the other featured rather more ... homely friends (who hopefully weren't told what the experiment was for).

They then had test subjects judge the profiles, looking at either the pretty friends or the ugly friends. After answering a survey on how much they'd like to meet the person the profile belonged to, the researchers found the shallow truth: People were a cool 20 percent more likely to like the profile just because he or she had pretty friends. Just so they could join that elusive club of pretty people.

Or to put it in more scientific terms, the phenomenon is based on Darwinian theory -- namely that whole "survival of the fittest" thing he was constantly going on about. As per our built-in survival instincts, we're constantly keeping a subconscious eye out for that optimal mixture of genes. So when you see an average-looking person who has a bunch of pretty people as Facebook friends, you instinctively project their attractiveness onto that person. You don't necessarily think of him sexually -- you just sort of assume that he must have access to the good gene pool, which in turn makes him worth knowing.

The possibility of getting invited to some kind of bikini party also probably doesn't hurt.

Fortunately, this general aversion to public humiliation offers a neat little shortcut to aspiring ascenders in popularity rankings: Scientists have found that when people see you get openly embarrassed, they tend to think of you as a nicer person.

A bunch of Berkeley psychology researchers set up an experiment where participants were filmed while they described a very embarrassing moment in their lives. Then, other participants watched the videos and rated how embarrassing the situation was while assessing how kind they felt the people telling the stories were. The participants who were consistently rated as nicest were the ones who were visibly affected by their embarrassing situations, writhing in front of the camera as memories of the Walrus Incident of '99 tormented their brains. What's more, it worked the other way around, too: The people who did have embarrassing stories, yet chose to maintain a careful poker face while telling them, got labeled as selfish and untrustworthy.

Several other experiments verified that our brains indeed have a tendency to associate visible embarrassment with kindness and trustworthiness, whereas all the shame-free Mr. Cools out there end up filed in the same "do not trust" folder with used car salesmen and Internet comedy writers. It makes sense, really: Since the kind of person who gets embarrassed easily is also likely to be extra nice to others in order to avoid getting a red face, we have just sort of started viewing embarrassment itself as an indicator of trustworthiness.

So yes, by all means embarrass yourself on your next date. Just make sure you do it before you get to the bedroom.

Find more from XJ on his blog. He'll also love you for an entire minute if you follow him on Twitter. Just a minute, though.

For more ways to make people like you, check out 7 Great Products for Telling the World You're a Rich Dick. Or learn about 7 Life Altering Decisions Made For You (Before Your Birth).

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out The One Country Whose Elections Are Crazier Than the USA's

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