22. Liking

We want to maintain rapport with people we like, and people we want to like us. Because of this, we are more likely to comply with requests made by people that we like.

A sense of liking is generated by some or all of the following:

Attractiveness. Researchers found an "attraction-leniency effect" on legal decision-making by showing that attractive criminal suspects were less likely to be convicted and were given less severe punishments than their unattractive counterparts (Efran, 1974).

Compliments. One of the surest routes to someone's goodwill is to let them see you seeing them in a positive light. Many people carry low self-esteem, and even if we brush off a compliment out of modesty, deep down our desire is to believe it, and our instinct is to like someone who gives us one. Christoph Korn, a postdoctoral fellow with the University of Zurich's Computational Emotion Neuroscience lab, notes that receiving a compliment triggers the same reward centres in the brain that activate during sex. The better the compliment, the greater the activity.

Similarities. People like people who are like them. "We like people who are similar to us. This fact seems to hold true whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or life-style" (Cialdini, 1984).

Contact and Cooperation. Spending time with someone alone is not enough to generate liking. But spend time with that same person and work towards a common goal and the act of cooperation will generate it. This plays into the reverse-engineering aspect of Commitment and Consistency, because the brain subconsciously rationalises: "I help my friends, and I do not help people I do not like, so I would not be helping this person if I did not like them."

Conditioning and Associations. Neuropsychologist Donald Hebb coined the phrase "neurons that fire together, wire together." Maybe you have a certain song that takes you back to your childhood, or a certain scent that reminds you of a grandparent. These stimuli combined with experiences often enough to form a neural connection. This is classical conditioning (Pavlov, 1902; Watson, 1913), and in the context of the Liking rule, if we are around a person at the same time as feeling positive emotions, we begin to neurologically associate that person with the positive feeling.

Ethical Use of Liking

Presenting yourself well, giving genuine compliments, building on common ground, acting collaboratively, and trying to ensure people have a positive experience of interacting with you is common sense for anyone who lives among other human beings. When done with integrity and sincerity it makes daily life more harmonious for everyone.

Many of us struggle with the JW pattern of becoming a social chameleon, morphing into whatever it takes for people to like us. Building relationships, personal or professional, from a place of actually liking each other for who you really are is immeasurably more rewarding than the performance we were trained to deliver.

How JWs Use Liking

Attractiveness. Great emphasis was placed on the physical appearance of congregation members, their houses, and the Kingdom Halls. You may remember the articles quoting secular newspapers referring to a JW convention as "a crowd of smiling, attractive, well-dressed people."

Compliments. Remember how much we would love-bomb a Bible study the first time they attended the meeting? Or the way we would compliment a woman the first time she wore a modest dress to the hall rather than a trouser suit?

A compliance ladder is powerful on its own. When you reward compliance with a dopamine hit, the brain begins to associate escalating compliance with feeling good.

(That last sentence is likely the most dangerous line you've read recently, FYI.)

Similarities. Finding common ground was emphasised in field service. And of course the further our Commitment and Consistency leads us into becoming a JW, the more similar we become to everyone else in the same situation.

Contact and Cooperation. Meeting attendance, field service, volunteering at conventions, working on quick builds, helping out at maintenance days. You spend a lot of time around people you may not ordinarily interact with, working towards a common goal.

Conditioning and Associations. Being involved in the congregation gave a sense of clarity, simplicity, and achievement. The world was explained in straightforward black-and-white terms. Confusion was turned into certainty. The more we bought into the belief system, the more we seemed to understand the world and our place in it, and we had a clear set of goals to achieve which gave us a sense of pride. Delusional or not, the feelings created by those delusions were neurologically very real, and they were all being associated with participation in the JW belief system.

Identification Exercise: Liking

• Think of someone in the organisation whose approval you actively sought. What was it about them that made their opinion matter so much? Attractiveness? Status? The compliments they gave you?
• Were there people you continued to spend time with, not because you genuinely liked them, but because the cooperative context of field service or meetings created a manufactured sense of closeness?
• How much of your social identity inside the organisation was genuinely you, and how much was a performance designed to be liked?
• On a scale of 1-10, how effective was this tactic when it was used against you?