Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy says it's important to demonstrate warmth first and then competence, especially in business settings. According to the pratfall effect, people will like you more after you make a mistake — but only if they believe you are a competent person. Revealing that you aren't perfect makes you more relatable and vulnerable toward the people around you.
Researcher Elliot Aronson at the University of Texas, Austin first discovered this phenomenon when he studied how simple mistakes can affect perceived attraction.
He asked male students from the University of Minnesota to listen to tape recordings of people taking a quiz. When people did well on the quiz but spilled coffee at the end of the interview, the students rated them higher on likability than when they did well on the quiz and didn't spill coffee or didn't do well on the quiz and spilled coffee.
According to a classic study by Theodore Newcomb, people are more attracted to those who are similar to them. This is known as the similarity-attraction effect. In his experiment, Newcomb measured his subjects' attitudes on controversial topics, such as sex and politics, and then put them in a University of Michigan-owned house to live together. By the end of their stay, the subjects liked their housemates more when they had similar attitudes about the topics measured.
Interestingly, a more recent study from researchers at the University of Virginia and Washington University in St. Louis found that Air Force recruits liked each other more when they had similar negative personality traits than when they shared positive ones. In one University of Wyoming study, nearly undergraduate women looked at photos of another woman in one of four poses: smiling in an open-body position, smiling in a closed-body position, not smiling in an open-body position, or not smiling in a closed-body position.
Results suggested that the woman in the photo was liked most when she was smiling, regardless of her body position. More recently, researchers at Stanford University and the University of Duisburg-Essen found that students who interacted with each other through avatars felt more positively about the interaction when the avatar displayed a bigger smile.
Bonus: Another study suggested that smiling when you first meet someone helps ensure they'll remember you later. People want to be perceived in a way that aligns with their own beliefs about themselves. This phenomenon is described by self-verification theory. We all seek confirmations of our views, positive or negative. For a series of studies at Stanford University and the University of Arizona, participants with positive and negative perceptions of themselves were asked whether they wanted to interact with people who had positive or negative impressions of them.
The participants with positive self-views preferred people who thought highly of them, while those with negative self-views preferred critics. This could be because people like to interact with those who provide feedback consistent with their known identity. Other research suggests that when people's beliefs about us line up with our own, our relationship with them flows more smoothly. That's likely because we feel understood, which is an important component of intimacy.
Experimenters provided some student pairs with a series of questions to ask, which got increasingly deep and personal. For example, one of the intermediate questions was "How do you feel about your relationship with your mother? For example, one question was "What is your favorite holiday? At the end of the experiment, the students who'd asked increasingly personal questions reported feeling much closer to each other than students who'd engaged in small talk.
You can try this technique on your own as you're getting to know someone. For example, you can build up from asking easy questions like the last movie they saw to learning about the people who mean the most to them in life. That doesn't hold true for women, however. Those who rank high in agreeableness are trustworthy, kind, and affectionate toward others. They're known for their pro-social behavior and they're often committed to volunteer work and altruistic activities.
Fun fact: Seek a financial investor who is high in agreeableness. Studies show agreeable investors are least likely to lose money from risky trading. Avoid an investor high in openness--that personality is associated with overconfidence that can lead an investor to take excessive risks.
People who rate high in openness are known for their broad range of interests and vivid imaginations. They're curious and creative and they usually prefer variety over rigid routines. They're known for their pursuits of self-actualization through intense, euphoric experiences like meditative retreats or living abroad.
Others may view them as unpredictable and unfocused. Fun fact: Openness is the only personality trait that consistently predicts political orientation. Studies show people high in openness are more likely to endorse liberalism and they're also more likely to express their political beliefs. Neurotic people experience a high degree of emotional instability. But the person who gives and gives and expects nothing in return? That's a rarity. And a treasured one.
Seuss said, "There is no one alive who is you-er than you. It's never an even playing field when you start playing that game. And it undermines your self confidence and slows you down. None of these are helpful to you in the short term or long term. Better to show your generosity by lending a hand to someone in need than telling others how generous you are. Actions speak louder than words, you know.
Even when it doesn't pay off people respect the person who's not afraid to try.
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