Pratfall Effect

In social psychology, the pratfall effect is the tendency for a person's likability to change after they make a mistake, in a direction that depends on how competent they were already perceived to be: highly competent individuals tend to become more likable after blundering, while an already-average person tends to become less likable for the identical error. The effect was first described in 1966 by the psychologist Elliot Aronson, and numerous later studies have isolated the roles of gender, self-esteem and the severity of the blunder in shaping the resulting change in appeal. When used deliberately as a marketing technique it is sometimes called the blemishing effect, and generalized versions of the pratfall effect are often invoked to explain the counterintuitive benefits that can follow from making a visible mistake.