Ben Franklin effect

The tendency to feel more favorably toward someone after doing them a favor. It is often explained as reducing inconsistency between helpful behavior and existing attitudes.

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Cognitive dissonance: Psychological discomfort arising from inconsistency among beliefs, attitudes, or actions. Helping someone one dislikes can create inconsistency that a changed attitude may resolve.
Benjamin Franklin: An American printer, scientist, diplomat, and political thinker who lived from 1706 to 1790. His account of winning over a rival supplied the effect's name.
Jecker and Landy 1969 experiment: A social-psychology experiment testing whether a favor from a researcher changes participants' liking for that researcher. It directly tested the effect by having the researcher ask some participants to return money.
Replication crisis: A scientific concern that many published findings fail to reproduce consistently in later studies. It motivates caution about treating a classic social-psychology result as settled.
Self-perception theory: The theory that people infer their attitudes by observing their own behavior and its circumstances. It explains post-favor liking through self-inference rather than dissonance reduction.
James Madison: An American political thinker and statesman who served as the fourth U.S. president. Franklin described overcoming Madison's hostility while both served in Pennsylvania's colonial legislature.
Reciprocity (social psychology): A social norm of responding to another person's action with a comparable action. Reciprocal obligation can explain responses to favors without requiring increased personal liking.
Meta-analysis: A statistical method for combining results from multiple studies addressing a related question. Pooled evidence can estimate the effect's average size and variation across studies.
Attitude change: A change in a person's evaluation of an object, person, or idea. The effect is a proposed route from helping behavior to changed evaluation.
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: Benjamin Franklin's unfinished memoir, written mainly in the late eighteenth century. Franklin recounted asking a rival to lend him a rare book in this memoir.