Appearing likeable has several advantages. But what actually makes a person likeable? According to the Pratfall effect, a characteristic that we often try to hide from others can earn us sympathy points.
On the one hand, we may sometimes wish we didn’t care about how we appear to other people. How nice it would be if we could just do our own thing, regardless of what those around us think of us. Well, how nice would that be? We’ll probably never know. Because on the other hand, we want to be liked. Since we are social creatures, the desire to be liked and accepted is one of our very basic needs. For our ancestors, rejection and exclusion from the group or community usually resulted in a quick death. Being liked was essential to her survival.
Things are no longer that drastic in our modern world. If we become outsiders, we will at least not freeze to death, starve or be eaten by saber-toothed tigers as easily as we would have in the green, species-rich past. But the fear of rejection still lies deep and firmly in our nature. And this fear is actually not completely unjustified. After all, likeable people generally get through life more easily than unsympathetic people. If we like a person, we are more likely to forgive them, more likely to help them, more likely to work with them, and much more likely to develop a connection with them. So the question arises: What makes a person likeable? And what makes us likeable?
Pratfall effect: How you can collect sympathy points with coffee stains
The truth is: This certainly cannot be answered in one word. To a certain extent, it depends on the situation at hand as to what is likeable and what is not. For example, humor will often make other people like us. But if we crack jokes at a funeral or in some other inappropriate situation, he will most likely make us unpopular. Furthermore, not all people like the same things. Some like restraint, others like a bold demeanor. Some vibe with funky chatterboxes, while others find no character type more annoying. However, there is one quality that seems to arouse sympathy in most people – and its absence, antipathy: flaw.
The social psychologist Elliot Aronson, among others, came to this conclusion in an experiment that he carried out in the 1960s. As part of the experiment, test subjects were played tapes of people answering quiz questions. Some of these people on the tapes (they were actually actors, but that doesn’t matter) were able to answer many questions correctly, others were able to answer few. And: Some of these people accidentally spilled coffee on their shirt (or said they did it), others didn’t. Afterwards, the test subjects were allowed to indicate which quiz participants they found likeable and which they didn’t and lo and behold: People who answered a lot of quiz questions correctly and spilled coffee on themselves achieved significantly better likeability ratings than those who knew a lot but didn’t spill coffee on themselves. Her misfortune apparently made the test subjects like her, so that the result of this experiment became known as the pratfall effect.
But what complicates things a bit: Quiz participants who could only give a few correct answers (less than 30 percent) did not gain any additional sympathy points from a coffee stain, but actually lost them as a result. So what does the pratfall effect really tell us?
Between flawlessness and complete incompetence
The key thing psychologists say we can take away from the Pratfall effect is: Flawlessness obviously arouses antipathy. Anyone who knows everything and shows no mistakes or areas of attack comes across as unsympathetic – or at least more unsympathetic than a person who knows everything and has a stain on their shirt. Perfect people make us suspicious and have something strange about them, mistakes promote trust and offer potential for identification. What is also true, however, is that excessive incompetence is apparently not a great driver of sympathy. Anyone who already stands out because of their incompetence can’t seem to convince other people of their worth by adding a few weaknesses on top of that.
Since many people tend to try to hide their weaknesses and mistakes, the first insight from the pratfall effect is, for many, the more important and exciting one: In order to be liked, we don’t have to be perfect. We don’t always have to do everything right and we don’t have to know, be able to or endure everything. In this respect, maybe we don’t need to worry so much about what others think of us: because if we are unwaveringly ourselves, without fearing that our flaws and shortcomings will come to light, enough people will naturally become likeable to us find. And those are probably exactly the ones that really matter.
Sources used: psychologytoday.com, waldhirsch.de