Liking principle examples: the separation that keeps warmth from working on you

You bought from the person, not from the proposal. That is not a character flaw, and it is not a reason to distrust people you like. It is a reason to make the proposal answer for itself. The liking principle examples below carry real names, and the separation at the end is the one correction they share.

What to take away

Where liking did the deciding

Joe Girard's monthly card. Girard sold cars at Merollis Chevrolet in Detroit, and the Guinness Book of World Records listed him as the world's greatest salesman. He mailed every customer a card each month, and the message never changed: "I like you." Buyers kept saying they bought from Girard rather than from Chevrolet.

The Tupperware party. Earl Tupper's containers moved off store shelves slowly until Brownie Wise built the home party into the sales channel in the 1950s. Guests buy from a neighbor in a living room, and the hostess earns a gift. Robert Cialdini uses the party in Influence (1984) as liking stacked on top of reciprocity.

Bernie Madoff's country club. Money reached the Ponzi scheme through country clubs, synagogues and friends, the pattern the SEC calls affinity fraud in its investor alert on the subject. Account statements claimed about $65 billion at the collapse in 2008. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in 2009, and the trustee has recovered roughly $14 billion.

Theranos and its board. Elizabeth Holmes put George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn on the Theranos board, and Rupert Murdoch invested $125 million. None of that tested a blood sample. Holmes was convicted of fraud in 2022 and sentenced to 11 years and three months.

The contractor who shook your hand. Two quotes, similar numbers, and one of them shook your hand and laughed at the right moment. Almost nobody records the specification carefully after that, and the specification is where the money is.

Angi, formerly Angie's List, publishes contractor reviews, and state licensing boards publish license numbers and complaint histories. If the deal was signed at your kitchen table rather than at the seller's place of business, the FTC's Cooling-Off Rule gives you three business days to cancel on purchases of $25 or more.

The colleague whose idea you defended. Edward Thorndike described the halo effect in 1920, after finding that military officers rated unrelated traits as if they moved together. You backed the proposal in the meeting and would have found the same holes in it if somebody else had brought it. Nothing dishonest happened; the search for problems just did not start.

The salesperson who found the connection. Gavin de Becker, in The Gift of Fear (1997), calls the manufactured version forced teaming: the stranger who invents a shared circumstance. Same town, same team, same first car.

The connection is often real. It is also the first thing a trained seller looks for, and the reason it is looked for is that it works. Sellers who hunt for connections are running a liking play, and the social influence basics techniques list marks it as one to spot.

The candidate you enjoyed talking to. Laszlo Bock, who ran people operations at Google, told The New York Times in 2013 that brainteasers were a waste of time, and the company moved toward structured interviews. A 1998 meta-analysis by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter found structured interviews predict job performance better than unstructured ones. An easy conversation measures how pleasant the conversation was.

The supplier who remembers your family. SAP Ariba runs sourcing events where suppliers bid against a written specification, which is how a price gets tested without the relationship entering the room. Years of small warmth accumulate into a relationship you would not want to damage by pushing on price. The relationship may be entirely genuine and the effect on your negotiating is the same either way.

The person who agreed with you first. Robert Cialdini's Influence (1984) names liking as one of six principles of persuasion. The other five are reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority and scarcity. Being agreed with is pleasant and it produces liking quickly. Notice how often the agreement comes early in the conversation and about something that costs nothing.

The attractive presentation. Hilke Plassmann and colleagues reported in a 2008 study in PNAS that the same wine drew higher ratings when the price on the label said more, with more activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex. Polish, confidence and good design produce warmth toward the thing itself. This is the version with no person in it, and it is the one people least expect to be working on them.

The friend who asked for a favor. Amway distributors and the college students who sell Cutco knives through Vector Marketing are both told to start with family and friends. Here the liking is real, long-standing and entirely legitimate. The question is still whether the favor is one you would do, and friendship is a reason to help rather than a reason to skip the question.

What friends can properly ask of each other is genuinely contested, and the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on friendship is a good account of why.

The referral from someone you like. Fairfield Greenwich Group, a feeder fund, sent about $7.5 billion of client money to Madoff, and much of it arrived through people the investors already trusted. The SEC's investor alert on affinity fraud names religious, ethnic, elderly and professional groups as the usual targets.

Warmth transfers along a chain, and the second person inherits credit they have not earned. Recommendations are useful and this transfer is not part of their usefulness.

The person who mirrored you. Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator, teaches mirroring in Never Split the Difference (2016): repeat the last one to three words back to the other side. Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh showed in 1999 that people copy posture and gestures without noticing and report more liking for the person who mirrors them.

Some of this is unconscious and ordinary. Some of it is trained, and the trained version is on the list of things to recognize rather than to use.

What each case has in common

In every row the left-hand fact is real and the right-hand question is unanswered. That is the whole pattern, and it is why the correction is a separation rather than a defense.

The separation

The separation has five items and takes a few minutes. Put the price on paper with no reference to who quoted it. Put the scope on paper. Put the deadline on paper. Put the failure clause on paper. Then read the whole page as though it arrived by post from a stranger.

This works better than any attempt to be less affected by people, which does not work at all. It also protects the relationship, since the alternative to separating the two is either overpaying or becoming suspicious of somebody who has done nothing wrong.

Two follow-ups do the rest. Would I accept this from someone I found irritating? And is there anything here I have not checked because checking felt rude? The second question finds most of it, because the real mechanism is not that you believed something false; it is that you stopped looking, and stopping was polite.

A search that ends early is the ordinary condition of human judgment rather than a lapse, which the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on bounded rationality sets out at length. The mechanism is set out under liking principle, and the general standard under social influence basics.

When the warmth was manufactured

Some of it is. Sales training teaches connection-finding, mirroring and agreement-first, and the techniques work whether or not the warmth behind them is real. The Tupperware party plan and the Cutco script both put a friend in front of the buyer on purpose.

You will not detect this reliably in the moment, and trying to is a poor use of attention. What you can do is make the detection unnecessary: if the proposal stands up on paper, it does not matter why you liked the person, and if it does not, the warmth was the argument.

That is the same reason the disclosure test is applied to the technique rather than to the feeling. Where a proposal also arrives with a gift attached, the second mechanism is covered under reciprocity. The field guide for tactics that depend on you not looking is under manipulation resistance.

Common questions

Should I avoid buying from people I like?

No. Preferring to work with people you get on with is sensible, and it is a reason to choose between acceptable options rather than a reason to accept one.

How do I do this with a long-standing supplier?

Price the work independently once a year, without telling anyone, and use it as information rather than as a threat. A relationship that cannot survive you knowing the market price was not a strong one.

Is mirroring dishonest?

Unconscious mirroring is not, and it is most of what happens. Trained mirroring done to produce compliance fails the disclosure test, since nobody says out loud that they are copying your posture to make you agreeable.

What if I dislike someone and their offer is good?

The same separation applies in reverse and people are much worse at this direction. Write down the proposal, read it cold, and notice that the objections you found may have arrived after the dislike rather than before it.