The counterintuitive way to warm-up a prickly relationship

They say you don't get to choose your family. You know what else you don't get to choose?

Your neighbours.

And sometimes (if you're honest) that relationship is even trickier than family, because at least with family there's history, shared context, the occasional Christmas dinner to smooth things over. With neighbours you have proximity without intimacy. Shared walls or fences or driveways (that you probably argue about...), but none of the social infrastructure that normally holds relationships together.

Most of my neighbours are a genuine delight. I'm lucky in that respect and I know it. But I'd be lying if I said it was 100%. So I did what I tend to do when something is bothering me. I went looking for research.

Specifically, I was thinking about the psychology of influence. What we can actually do about the relationships that sit juuuuust outside our circle of control. The ones where avoiding the person forever is technically possible but increasingly exhausting, and where doing something big and generous feels both risky and fake. I wanted something smaller. Something that worked with human psychology rather than against it.

What I found is called the Ben Franklin Effect. And it turns out that the way to make someone like you more might have nothing to do with being nicer to them.

The conventional wisdom is: do something kind for someone and they'll warm to you. The research suggests the opposite works better. Ask them to do something for you, and watch what happens.

Benjamin Franklin's surprisingly modern problem

In the 1730s, Benjamin Franklin, then serving as clerk of the Pennsylvania General Assembly - had a difficult colleague problem.

A fellow legislator had publicly opposed him, tarnished his reputation in front of his peers, and made no secret of his contempt. Franklin needed this man's goodwill. He was educated, wealthy, and influential. He was the kind of person who could cause serious problems, or, handled correctly, become a genuine ally.

Franklin didn't throw a dinner party. He didn't go out of his way to be helpful or visible or impressive.

He asked to borrow a book.

Specifically, he'd heard the man owned a rare and unusual volume. He wrote a polite note asking whether he might borrow it for a few days. The man, probably surprised, perhaps flattered, sent it immediately. Franklin returned it a week later with a warm note of thanks.

When the legislature next convened, the man crossed the room and spoke to Franklin for the first time. Warmly. They became, in Franklin's own words, great friends. A friendship that lasted until the man's death. He once wrote, "He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged."

The 1969 study that proved Franklin right

Psychologists Jon Jecker and David Landy set up what looks, on the surface, like a straightforward quiz competition. Seventy-four student participants competed in a knowledge contest for cash prizes. After the competition, different participants were approached in three different ways.

1. The first group was approached by the researcher personally, who explained he'd been funding the study out of his own pocket, was running short, and asked whether they'd mind returning their winnings as a personal favour to him.

2. The second group was approached by a secretary, who asked them to return the money, not to the researcher personally, but to the psychology department's general fund.

3. The third group wasn't approached at all. They kept the money and heard nothing.

All three groups were then asked how much they liked the researcher.

The results landed exactly where Franklin's intuition predicted. The group who had done the personal favour liked him the most. Significantly more than the control group, who'd simply kept the money and formed a neutral impression. The relationship was the point. The personal nature of the ask was the mechanism.

It wasn't the generosity that created the warmth. It was the direct, personal ask. And the brain's need to make sense of why it had said yes.

What your brain does with the discomfort

The psychological explanation for why this works is rooted in one of the most well-evidenced concepts in social psychology: cognitive dissonance. The mental discomfort that arises when our actions and our beliefs are pointing in different directions.

The dissonance in this case is specific. You've just done something helpful, invested time, effort, or in Jecker and Landy's study, actual money for someone you don't particularly like or don't know well. Your brain now has a problem. It asks, in its own way: why would I do that?

There are two ways to resolve it. You could conclude that you were manipulated (which isn't a comfortable story either). Or you could adjust your attitude toward the person upward: I helped them because, actually, they're probably not so bad. Maybe I like them more than I thought. Most people, most of the time, take the second route.

What this actually looks like in practice

Let me be honest about what this research is and isn't saying, because there are two ways to misread it.

It is not saying: manufacture a fake request, deploy it strategically, and watch the relationship transform overnight. That's the manipulation reading, and it misses both the spirit and the mechanism. The effect works because the ask is genuine. Franklin wanted the book.

What the research is saying is something subtler and more practically useful: in a relationship that's stuck... where the default is avoidance... asking for something small and genuine may be more effective at shifting the dynamic than any amount of performed friendliness.

For the neighbour context (which is where this train of thought started for me): a specific, low-stakes, genuine ask. Could I borrow your [relevant thing]? Do you happen to know a good [local service they'd plausibly know about]? I noticed you know about [their obvious interest]... could I ask you something quickly?

The ask has to be sized right. Too large and it creates pressure that damages rather than builds. Too generic and it reads as hollow. Franklin didn't ask for just any book. He asked for that book, the one he'd heard was rare and interesting, the one that positioned the man as someone with exceptional taste. That specificity was the respect in disguise.

The practical implication for difficult relationships at work, at home, in any context, is that what you do shapes how you feel about the other person, not just the reverse. Small kindnesses and genuine asks are not just social lubricants. They are, if the research is right, actually changing how you perceive the other person.

Actions don't just follow feelings. They create them. Which means you have more agency in a difficult relationship than your feelings, in the moment, are likely to suggest.

What I'm trying

I'll be honest: this is still a work in progress for me.

The research is clear enough. The logic is sound enough. But there's still that gap between knowing something intellectually and actually doing it... particularly when the doing requires a small act of voluntary vulnerability toward someone you've been actively avoiding.

What I keep coming back to, though, is this. The alternative, which is continuing the low-level friction, the stiff nods, the slight tension every time the situation requires proximity has a cost too. It's just a cost that's spread out into small, easily-ignored increments rather than one visible act.

Relationships are not fixed states afterall. They're processes, and the inputs that drive those processes are often not the ones we'd intuitively reach for. Franklin didn't wait to feel warm toward his rival before acting warmly. He acted first. The feeling followed.

One question to sit with

• In the relationship you'd most like to improve, are you waiting to feel differently before you act differently? And what might it look like to reverse that sequence?

© Copyright Evelina Bereni | All rights reserved | Brisbane, Australia.

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Evelina lives in Brisbane, Queensland but travels globally.