Ben Franklin Effect

The Ben Franklin effect is the phenomenon in which a person who has done a favor for someone else comes to like that person more, rather than less, as a result of having helped them, contrary to the intuitive expectation that helping an initially disliked person would not improve one's feelings toward them. The effect takes its name from a story recounted by the American statesman Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography, in which he won over a rival legislator by asking to borrow a rare book from him rather than by doing the man a favor himself. Psychologists have linked the effect to cognitive dissonance theory, proposing that people who have chosen to help someone tend to adjust their attitude toward that person to be more consistent with the effort of having helped them, a mechanism experimentally examined in later studies including work by Jon Jecker and David Landy in the 1960s.