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PEOPLE
16 psychological tricks to make people like you immediately
Shana Lebowitz,
Business Insider

Mar. 15, 2017, 12:36 PM

2,259,866

Make better relationships, faster.Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design/FlickrIt'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 satisfied 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 findings. Read on for insights that will
cast your current friendships in a new light — and will help you form better relationships, faster.

View As: One Page Slides

Flickr/Art Comments

1. Copy the person you're with

This strategy is called mirroring, and involves subtly mimicking another person's behavior.
When talking to someone, try copying their body language, gestures, and facial expressions.

In 1999, New York University researchers documented the "chameleon effect," which occurs
when people unconsciously mimic each other's behavior. 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 behavior 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 behavior.

Universal
2. Spend more time around the people you're hoping to befriend
According to the mere-exposure effect, 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
different number of times. When experimenters showed male students pictures of the four
women, the men demonstrated a greater affinity for those women they'd seen more often in class
— even though they hadn't interacted with any of them.

Tony Gentile/Reuters

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 effect
occurred even when people knew certain traits didn't describe the people who had talked about
them.

According to Gretchen Rubin, author of the book "The Happiness Project,""whatever you say
about other people influences 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.

Flickr/mooks262

4. Try to display positive emotions

Emotional contagion describes what happens when people are strongly influenced by the moods
of other people. According to a research paperfrom 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.

Flickr/reynermedia
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 saysit's important to demonstrate warmth first

and then competence, especially in 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."

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

6. Reveal your flaws from time to time

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.

Reuters/Brendan McDermid

7. Emphasize 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 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.
 Adam Berry/Getty Images

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 effects of interpersonal
touch on restaurant tipping, and had some waitresses briefly touch customers on the hand or
shoulder as they were returning their change. As it turns out, those waitresses earned
significantly larger tips than the ones who didn't touch their customers.

Reuters

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 first meet someonehelps ensure they'll
remember you later.

Flickr / Craig Cochrane

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-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.

pedrosimoes7 via flickr

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 off 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 given small-talk-type
questions. For example, one question was "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 confide in you in the future.

Daryn Nakhuda/Flickr

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 andtrustingness 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 onPsychologyToday.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 identified as the most vital in the realm of friendships."
 Toby Melville/Reuters

13. Display a sense of humor

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 humor was really important.

Another study from researchers at DePaul University and Illinois State University found that
using humor when you're first 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.

Flickr/University of Exeter

14. Let them talk about themselves

Harvard researchers recently discoveredthat 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.

Flickr/kevinmarsh

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
deflected."
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.

Flickr/University of Exeter

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.