16 Psychological Tricks To Make People Like You Immediately - The Independent

3/17/2017 16psychologicaltrickstomakepeoplelikeyouimmediately|TheIndependent
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16 psychological tricks to make people like you

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It's hard to say exactly why you like someone.
Maybe it's their goofy smile; maybe it's their razor-sharp wit; or
maybe it's simply that they're easy to be around. You just like
them.
But scientists generally aren't satised with answers like that, and
they've spent years trying to pinpoint the exact factors that draw
one person to another.
Below, we've rounded up some of their most intriguing ndings.

Read on for insights that will cast your current friendships in a
new light and will help you form better relationships, faster.
1. Copy the person you're with
This strategy is called mirroring, and involves subtly mimicking

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another person's behaviour.
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When talking to someone, try
copying their body language, gestures, and facial expressions.
In 1999, New York University researchers documented the

"chameleon eect," which occurs when people unconsciously
mimic each other's behaviour. That mimicry facilitates liking.
Researchers had 72 men and women work on a task with a

partner. The partners (who worked for the researchers) either
mimicked the other participant's behaviour or didn't, while
researchers videotaped the interactions. At the end of the
interaction, the researchers had participants indicate how much
they liked their partners.
Sure enough, participants were more likely to say that they liked
their partner when their partner had been mimicking their
behaviour.
2. Spend more time around the people you're hoping to befriend
According to the mere-exposure eect, people tend to like other

people who are familiar to them.
In one example of this phenomenon, psychologists at the

University of Pittsburgh had four women pose as students in a
university psychology class. Each woman showed up in class a
dierent number of times. When experimenters showed male
students pictures of the four women, the men demonstrated a
greater anity for those women they'd seen more often in class
even though they hadn't interacted with any of them.
3. Compliment other people
People will associate the adjectives you use to describe other

people with your personality. This phenomenon is called
spontaneous trait transference.
One study published in the Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology found that this eect occurred even when people
knew certain traits didn't describe the people who had talked
about them.
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According to Gretchen Rubin, author of the book "The
Happiness Project," "whatever you say about other people
inuences how people see you."
If you describe someone else as genuine and kind, people will

also associate you with those qualities. The reverse is also true: If
you are constantly trashing people behind their backs, your
friends will start to associate the negative qualities with you as
well.
4. Try to display positive emotions
Emotional contagion describes what happens when people are

strongly inuenced by the moods of other people. According to a
research paper from the Ohio University and the University of
Hawaii, people can unconsciously feel the emotions of those
around them.
The authors of the paper say that's possibly because we naturally

mimic others' movements and facial expressions, which in turn
makes us feel something similar to what they're feeling.
If you want to make others feel happy when they're around you,
do your best to communicate positive emotions.
5. Be warm and competent
Princeton University psychologists and their colleagues proposed

the stereotype content model, which is a theory that people
judge others based on their warmth and competence.
According to the model, if you can portray yourself as warm

i.e., noncompetitive and friendly people will feel like they can
trust you. If you seem competent for example, if you have high
economic or educational status they're more inclined to
respect you.
Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy says it's important to

demonstrate warmth
1K News Politics Voices Culture
rst and then competence, especially in
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business settings.
"From an evolutionary perspective," Cuddy writes in her book

"Presence," "it is more crucial to our survival to know whether a
person deserves our trust."
6. Reveal your aws from time to time
According to the pratfall eect, 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 rst

discovered this phenomenon when he studied how simple
mistakes can aect 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 coee 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 coee or didn't do
well on the quiz and spilled coee.
7. Emphasise shared values
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 eect. 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
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had similar negativeshares
personality traits than when they shared
positive ones.
8. Casually touch them
Subliminal touching occurs when you touch a person so subtly

that they barely notice. Common examples include tapping
someone's back or touching their arm, which can make them feel
more warmly toward you.
In a French study, young men stood on street corners and talked

to women who walked by. The men had double the success rate
in striking up a conversation when they lightly touched the
woman's arms as they talked to them instead of doing nothing at
all.
A University of Mississippi and Rhodes College experiment

studied the eects of interpersonal touch on restaurant tipping,
and had some waitresses briey touch customers on the hand or
shoulder as they were returning their change. As it turns out,
those waitresses earned signicantly larger tips than the ones
who didn't touch their customers.
9. Smile
In one University of Wyoming study, nearly 100 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 rst meet
1K
someone helps ensure
they'll remember you later.
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10. See the other person how they want to be seen
People want to be perceived in a way that aligns with their own

beliefs about themselves. This phenomenon is described by self-
verication theory. We all seek conrmations 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 ows more
smoothly. That's likely because we feel understood, which is an
important component of intimacy.
11. Tell them a secret
Self-disclosure may be one of the best relationship-building

techniques.
In a study led by researchers at the State University of New York

at Stony Brook, the California Graduate School of Family
Psychology, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and
Arizona State University, college students were paired o and
told to spend 45 minutes getting to know each other.
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?" Other pairs were

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given small-talk-type
questions. For example, one question was
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"What is your favorite holiday? Why?"
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. When you share
intimate information with another person, they are more likely to
feel closer to you and want to conde in you in the future.
12. Show that you can keep their secrets, too
Two experiments led by researchers at the University of Florida,

Arizona State University, and Singapore Management University
found that people place a high value on both trustworthiness and
trustingness in their relationships.
Those two traits proved especially important when people were

imagining their ideal friend and ideal employee.
As Suzanne Degges-White of Northern Illinois University writes

on PsychologyToday.com: "Trustworthiness is comprised of
several components, including honesty, dependability, and
loyalty, and while each is important to successful relationships,
honesty and dependability have been identied as the most vital
in the realm of friendships."
13. Display a sense of humour
Research from Illinois State University and California State

University at Los Angeles found that, regardless of whether
people were thinking about their ideal friend or romantic
partner, a sense of humour was really important.
Another study from 1Kresearchers at DePaul University and Illinois

State University found
that using humour when you're rst
shares
getting to know someone can make the person like you more. In
fact, the study suggested that participating in a humorous task
(like having someone wear a blindfold while the other person
teaches them a dance) can increase romantic attraction.
14. Let them talk about themselves
Harvard researchers recently discovered that talking about

yourself may be inherently rewarding, the same way that food,
money, and sex are.
In one study, the researchers had participants sit in an fMRI

machine and respond to questions about either their own
opinions or someone else's. Participants had been asked to bring
a friend or family member to the experiment, who was sitting
outside the fMRI machine. In some cases, participants were told
that their responses would be shared with the friend or relative;
in other cases, their responses would be kept private.
Results showed that the brain regions associated with motivation

and reward were most active when participants were sharing
information publicly but also were active when they were
talking about themselves without anyone listening.
In other words, letting someone share a story or two about their

life instead of blabbing about yours could give them more
positive memories of your interaction.
15. Be a little vulnerable
Writing on PsychologyToday.com, Jim Taylor of the University of

San Francisco argues that emotional openness or the lack
thereof can explain why two people do or don't click.
Yet Taylor admits:
"Emotional openness, of course, comes with risks that involve

making yourself vulnerable and not knowing whether this
emotional exposure will be accepted and reciprocated or rejected

and deected."
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shares

It might be worth the risk the same Illinois State University
and California State University at Los Angeles study cited above
found that expressiveness and openness are desirable and
important traits in ideal companions.
It doesn't matter whether that partner is a romantic partner or a

friend.
16. Act like you like them
Psychologists have known for a while about a phenomenon called

"reciprocity of liking": When we think someone likes us, we tend
to like them as well.
In one 1959 study published in Human Relations, for example,

participants were told that certain members of a group discussion
would probably like them. These group members were chosen
randomly by the experimenter.
After the discussion, participants indicated that the people they

liked best were the ones who supposedly liked them.
More recently, researchers at the University of Waterloo and the

University of Manitoba found that when we expect people to
accept us, we act warmer toward them thereby increasing the
chances that they really will like us. So even if you're not sure
how a person you're interacting with feels about you, act like you
like them and they'll probably like you back.
This is an update of an article originally written by Maggie

Zhang.
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3/17/2017 16psychologicaltrickstomakepeoplelikeyouimmediately|TheIndependent

16 psychological tricks to make people like you

It's hard to say exactly why you like someone.

Below, we've rounded up some of their most intriguing ndings.

1. Copy the person you're with

This strategy is called mirroring, and involves subtly mimicking

In 1999, New York University researchers documented the

Researchers had 72 men and women work on a task with a

2. Spend more time around the people you're hoping to befriend

According to the mere-exposure eect, people tend to like other

In one example of this phenomenon, psychologists at the

3. Compliment other people

People will associate the adjectives you use to describe other

One study published in the Journal of Personality and Social

If you describe someone else as genuine and kind, people will

4. Try to display positive emotions

Emotional contagion describes what happens when people are

The authors of the paper say that's possibly because we naturally

5. Be warm and competent

Princeton University psychologists and their colleagues proposed

According to the model, if you can portray yourself as warm

Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy says it's important to

"From an evolutionary perspective," Cuddy writes in her book

6. Reveal your aws from time to time

Researcher Elliot Aronson at the University of Texas, Austin rst

7. Emphasise shared values

According to a classic study by Theodore Newcomb, people are

Interestingly, a more recent study from researchers at the

8. Casually touch them

Subliminal touching occurs when you touch a person so subtly

In a French study, young men stood on street corners and talked

A University of Mississippi and Rhodes College experiment

In one University of Wyoming study, nearly 100 undergraduate

More recently, researchers at Stanford University and the

People want to be perceived in a way that aligns with their own

For a series of studies at Stanford University and the University

The participants with positive self-views preferred people who

Other research suggests that when people's beliefs about us line

11. Tell them a secret

Self-disclosure may be one of the best relationship-building

In a study led by researchers at the State University of New York

Experimenters provided some student pairs with a series of

about your relationship with your mother?" Other pairs were

At the end of the experiment, the students who'd asked

12. Show that you can keep their secrets, too

Two experiments led by researchers at the University of Florida,

Those two traits proved especially important when people were

As Suzanne Degges-White of Northern Illinois University writes

13. Display a sense of humour

Research from Illinois State University and California State

Another study from 1Kresearchers at DePaul University and Illinois

14. Let them talk about themselves

Harvard researchers recently discovered that talking about

In one study, the researchers had participants sit in an fMRI

Results showed that the brain regions associated with motivation

In other words, letting someone share a story or two about their

15. Be a little vulnerable

Writing on PsychologyToday.com, Jim Taylor of the University of

Yet Taylor admits:

"Emotional openness, of course, comes with risks that involve

emotional exposure will be accepted and reciprocated or rejected

It doesn't matter whether that partner is a romantic partner or a

16. Act like you like them