Ask them for a small favor. They'll like you more for it.

Benjamin Franklin tells a story in his autobiography about a rival — a fellow legislator who disliked him and had the standing to make his life difficult. Franklin didn’t try to win him over with flattery or favors, which is what you’d expect. He did the opposite. He’d heard the man owned a rare and interesting book, and he wrote to ask if he might borrow it. The man, presumably a little surprised, sent it over. Franklin returned it about a week later with a warm note of thanks. The next time they met, the rival — who had never so much as spoken to him kindly before — was friendly, and remained so for life.

Franklin drew a rule from it that has carried his name ever since: he that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged. The person who does you a favor comes to like you more. Not the other way around.

The arrow runs backwards

The intuitive model of relationships has a clear direction: I like you, therefore I do things for you. Liking is the cause, favors are the effect. What Franklin noticed is that the arrow also runs the other way, and often more strongly.

The mechanism is one your brain runs constantly and quietly: it dislikes holding an action and an attitude that don’t match, and when they clash, it’s usually easier to adjust the attitude than to undo the action. So a man who has just gone out of his way for someone he supposedly disliked is left with a small, uncomfortable gap — why did I do that for him? The cleanest way to close the gap isn’t to regret the book. It’s to revise the feeling: well — I suppose I don’t mind him after all. The favor is a fact that can’t be unmade. The dislike is a feeling that can. So the feeling gives way, and the person ends up liking someone their own behavior has quietly committed them to.

What this does to a build decision

Most growth thinking is built on the reciprocity arrow: give the user something valuable up front — a free tool, a generous trial, a helpful guide — so they feel a pull to give back. That’s real, and it works. But it quietly casts the user as a taker, and it puts all the effort, and all the investment, on your side of the table.

The Franklin effect points at a second, underused lever: get the user to do a small favor for the product, early, and their attachment can climb in a way that receiving never produces. Not a demand — a genuine, low-stakes ask that they can grant without resentment. Teach the recommender what you like. Correct the transcript. Report the bad result so it gets better. Name the workspace, add the first item, tell us what you’re here to do. Each of these is a tiny act of giving to the product — and afterward the same quiet arithmetic runs: I wouldn’t put effort into this if I didn’t care about it. The effort becomes evidence, to the user’s own mind, that this thing matters to them.

This is a cousin of the IKEA effect, but it’s not the same claim. IKEA is about valuing what you built with your own hands. Franklin is about liking — the relationship warms because the user has invested in it, and people protect what they’ve invested in. Build a product that only ever gives, and you build gratitude, which is shallow and expires. Build one that lets people put a little of themselves in early, and you build attachment, which compounds.

The honest hedge

Two cautions, because this is a lever that turns into a weapon if you overreach. First, the size of the ask matters enormously. A small, reasonable favor invites the warm reinterpretation; a large or manipulative one triggers the opposite — resentment and reactance, the sense of being used. The mechanism that makes someone like you for lending a book will make them resent you for a demand dressed up as a request. Second, the science itself deserves a hedge: the specific “favor → liking” finding (its careful lab version is Jecker and Landy’s 1969 study) is real but modest and context-dependent, and it has not always replicated cleanly. What’s on firmer ground is the engine underneath it — the mind’s strong preference to keep its actions and attitudes in agreement, and its habit of adjusting the attitude when the action is already done. Build on the engine, ask small, and mean the ask.

The science, to look up: the Benjamin Franklin effect (the anecdote is from Franklin’s Autobiography; the classic experiment is Jecker & Landy, 1969, “Liking a person as a function of doing him a favor”). The mechanism sits inside cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) and self-perception theory (Bem, 1967) — with the caveat that the specific effect is smaller and more situational than the story suggests.