Success did not seem as certain for Jeff. He had decided to apply to law school only a few months before he graduated from the University at Albany, SUNY. He was more interested in soccer than his classes while at school, and despite his high intelligence, he did not have the grades to make him an obvious lock for top law schools. Yet throughout college he had received many invitations to join his professors’ research labs or intern at their legal practices, offers he usually declined. It was one of those professors who had ultimately convinced Jeff that he should apply to law school. “Your energy would work well in a firm,” the professor told him. “At the large firms, being an attorney is about relationships as much as it is about the law. You’ll be happy there.” But as Jeff sat in the auditorium on that first day, he asked himself, What am I doing here? Do I even want to be a lawyer?
Steve remained focused throughout his entire law school career. He studied, he clerked, and he built his résumé. For his part, Jeff always seemed to be off socializing with classmates—grabbing coffee, going out on dates, chatting in the hallways. One afternoon in their first year, Steve looked out the library window and saw Jeff laughing with a group of classmates. He returned to his studies, proud of how disciplined he had been to reach this point in his career.
Today, almost two decades later, Jeff is doing far better than even he ever expected. A senior partner at a well-regarded firm in Atlanta, he is the first to arrive at the office every morning, not because he has to be but because he can’t wait to see his colleagues and do the work he loves. He’s an outstanding attorney.
Things did not work out as well for Steve. Despite a terrific start in law school, over time he gradually lost his confidence and ultimately his interest in the field. He started as an associate at a mid-level firm back in Rhode Island where he’d previously worked as an intern. But he was in over his head, and after a couple of years of middling performance, he and a colleague decided to start their own practice. After a year without much success, he left. He picked up a few cases here and there, but eventually he grew annoyed. He currently works from home doing part-time consulting for a local real estate agency and is quite unhappy about how his career turned out.
Steve’s and Jeff’s unexpected professional outcomes are just the kind of thing that drives college admissions committees crazy. Who will be the surest bet to succeed? On the first day of law school, Steve was clearly the more qualified, focused, and confident student, with a trajectory that predicted success. Jeff’s path was far less clear, and few would have forecast that his achievements would exceed Steve’s, yet he is by far the more competent attorney and the happier person in his job today.
This same issue faces anyone hiring new employees. Beyond what is on applicants’ résumés, what is the factor that helps distinguish those who will flourish from those who will fail?
After accounting for all of the usual qualities that contribute to well-being and success—intelligence, socioeconomic status, school achievement, physical health, mental health, and so on—there is one factor that has remarkable power to predict life trajectories. It predicts which children thrive. It predicts which employees succeed. It even predicts who enjoys more rewarding romantic relationships and better physical health. It was the one factor that Jeff had but Steve did not.
That factor is likability—not status, but likability. But perhaps more interesting is how likability affects us.
“I think it’s favoritism!” one parent chastised me before I began a talk at a local high school about my research on the power of likability. “Some people just get all the breaks—life is handed to them on a silver platter.”
“People are biased,” a friend who works in a large accounting firm insisted. “Everyone loves going to happy hour with Terri at my office, so when they are asked who is good at their job, they all say her. Meanwhile, the rest of us work our butts off, and no one notices.”
“It’s a con job” is another argument I’ve heard. “If a guy is really smooth, friends with everyone, making them all laugh, then he is probably up to something. It’s a fake.”
As it happens, they’re all wrong.
Likable people are not just perceived to be better at their jobs, more satisfied, happier, and more fulfilled. They actually are all those things. The reason is that likable people live in a different world from the one inhabited by their unlikable peers. It is a world of their own making, and it produces a chain reaction of experiences that molds their lives in dramatic ways.
It’s a world worth understanding, because following the example of likable people might just change our lives.
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Psychologists have been investigating the power of likability for decades. A host of studies began when researchers first found that some children were consistently nominated by their peers as classmates who were “liked the most,” far more often than they were picked as someone that classmates “liked the least.” These are the Accepted children discussed in Chapter 2. But the power of likability is not only evident among children—Accepteds can be identified at any age. Peer relationship dynamics are remarkably similar across the life span, from four-year-olds in preschool to senior citizens in retirement communities. Accepteds also can be found in any context—the classroom, the office, the softball team, places of worship, the PTA. All include some people who seem effortlessly, immensely likable.
Findings regarding the long-term benefits enjoyed by Accepted people are abundant in the psychological literature. In 1987, developmental psychologists Jeff Parker and Steve Asher summarized dozens of research studies in their now-seminal review of the long-term effects of likability. Their results revealed that compared to the Rejecteds, Accepted children grew up far less likely to drop out of school, commit crimes, or experience mental illness as adults. In another study, Penn State psychologist Scott Gest and his colleagues asked 205 children in grades three through six to report on one another’s likability. Then, ten years later, Gest asked all of the participants to report on how their lives were going. The children initially picked as most likable by their peers grew up to be most likely to be employed and to have gotten promotions. The likable kids also had better odds of being in long-term, satisfying friendships and romantic partnerships. Such findings seem to be universal—similar results were obtained in a seven-year study of youth in Shanghai, China.
But studies like these often provide more questions than answers. The one I hear most frequently is: Does any of this research prove that likability itself leads to positive outcomes? How do we know that the same factors that make people likable aren’t the real reasons they are also happy and successful?
In fact, research does tell us that there is indeed a specific set of traits that almost guarantees that an individual will be very well liked. It’s a fairly obvious list, and it is generally similar for adults and children.
The most likable people are those who cooperate with others, are helpful, share, and follow the rules.
Likable people are generally well adjusted.
They are smart (but not too smart!).
They are often in a good mood.
They can hold up their end of a conversation.
But they make sure to give others a turn to speak, too.
They are creative, especially at solving awkward social dilemmas.
And perhaps most important: they don’t disrupt the group.
Are these the behaviors that are actually responsible for making people happy and successful? Or is there something about being likable—about being popular—that improves our lives directly?
From a scientific perspective, the ideal solution to these questions would be to conduct a randomized clinical trial—in other words, to manipulate a classroom so that one random group of kids became Accepted while others were Rejected. After some period of time, investigators would be able to see how members of each group turned out. You’d have to tell the stude
nts, “Remember, these are the kids you really like, so make sure you treat them well. These other kids you don’t like so much. Make sure you are not as excited to be with them for the next few years!” Fortunately, researchers are bound by a code of ethics that prohibits them from experimenting with people’s lives this way.
But back in 1968, a third-grade schoolteacher named Jane Elliot did attempt something comparable with her classroom in Iowa shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Her famous “brown eyes, blue eyes” demonstration was designed to teach children about discrimination, and it lasted only a few days. On the first day, she randomly selected children with brown eyes to be “superior” to those whose eyes were blue. She instructed the brown-eyed group not to sit with blue-eyed children or play with them, and she pointed out their foibles. Meanwhile, she offered extra attention and praise to the students with brown eyes, and instructed them to play enthusiastically with one another. It should be noted that her demonstration was intended to illustrate the effects of prejudice, not likability, and Ms. Elliot herself purposefully contributed to the disparity between brown- and blued-eyed children to demonstrate the widespread assumptions of inferiority that are leveled at minority groups.
Nevertheless, it’s interesting that after only one day of being more liked by their peers, the brown-eyed children began acting more confidently and doing better in schoolwork. The blue-eyed children, meanwhile, became timid, glum, and isolated. They were even less likely to correctly answer quiz items as frequently as they had just the day before. When Ms. Elliot reversed the conditions of her experiment the following day—the blue-eyed children were now deemed superior to those with brown eyes—she found the same results.
Could the effect of likability have similar effects over a lifetime? Is likability really related to our long-term happiness and success? Or is there some other variable that accounts for both?
Absent the use of a randomized clinical trial to study the consequences of likability, researchers have relied on longitudinal research—studies that observe people, sometimes over years or decades—to examine how experiences early in life may predict outcomes much later. Longitudinal research makes it possible to analyze all types of possible predictors of later happiness and success, and then determine which of these factors are relevant to predict life outcomes. It’s also a useful approach to verify whether it is likability that predicts life outcomes or some other factor—a “third variable”—that may be responsible for both.
These third variables are important to consider. Have you read that scientists found a strong link between increases in ice-cream sales and the growth in murder rates? Although it would be tempting to assume that one causes the other—perhaps the sugar high from ice cream sends people running from Baskin-Robbins in a homicidal rage—the link can actually be explained by a completely separate “third” variable: hot weather.
Is the apparent link between likability and later success also due to a third variable? It doesn’t seem so. Study after study has revealed that even after accounting for the effects of IQ, socioeconomic status, mental health, or any of the behaviors that make us likable, there is something about being Accepted that directly predicts how happy, fulfilled, and even successful we are years later.
One study examined more than ten thousand Swedish youth and then followed them over the next thirty to forty years. The children’s likability was measured at the age of thirteen along with a host of possible factors that could explain both their likability and later outcomes. Researchers measured each subject’s IQ, aggressive and disruptive behavior, history of physical and mental illness, parents’ level of education and income, and even the child’s future goals. After accounting for all of these possible influences on adult outcomes, it was likability that predicted happiness, employment, and income decades later. In fact, compared to those who were well liked as kids, those who were rejected were two to five times more likely to be unemployed or request welfare assistance. Likable children even grew up less prone than others to be diagnosed with diabetes, obesity, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure.
Studies also have looked at the value of likability by examining how it might predict changes in our lives. This approach offers another way to determine whether likability might have a causal effect. After all, Accepted children might grow up to seem happier than others because they were happy in the first place, while Rejected children might seem as though they became depressed adults because they were depressed to begin with. In fact, their sad demeanor may have been one of the factors that led to their being rejected.
In my own research, as well as that of many other psychologists, this possibility also has been tested. For instance, in one study of adolescents conducted in my own lab with then-postdoctoral fellow Julie Wargo Aikins, we collected information from over 150 tenth-grade students to measure likability and depressive symptoms. After all the students in the study picked who in their class was liked most and least, we asked each participant to identify any symptoms of depression they might have via a standard checklist used by clinicians. About eighteen months later, we gathered data from the same group again. Our results revealed that some adolescents already had signs of depression during our initial survey. By the time they were about to graduate high school, however, many more participants reported depressive symptoms, and it was the Rejected tenth graders who were significantly more likely to fall into that category. Conversely, being likable predicted improvements in mood over the same period, even among teens who were happy when we first saw them.
What is it about likability, then, that has such a powerful and enduring effect on us?
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It’s a sunny day on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As I stand by the “pit,” a gathering spot right next to the student union, I see about two hundred students walking toward me, all wearing identical hot pink T-shirts. People stare at them and take pictures with their phones as the mob reaches me and then stops.
I am wearing the same pink T-shirt. The students are all enrolled in my course on popularity, and we are taking part in an annual experiment designed to help us understand the reciprocal exchange of “transactions” that continually occur between ourselves and our environment. Our experiment does not concern popularity per se, but it is a demonstration of what psychologists call the “transactional model”—the chain reaction involving how others act toward us, how we behave in response, and how those responses in turn elicit new behaviors among others all day, every day, for our entire life. The transactional model refers to a give-and-take between what we put out into the world and how everyone else responds to it. My experiment was intended to demonstrate how our lives can change with even one simple adjustment to this dynamic.
For the first day of the experiment, the control day, students are asked to wear their normal clothing while they keep a written record of their social interactions and their mood. Every hour or so, they jot down whether they initiated any conversations with others, whether they met anyone new, and how they felt at the time—happy, bored, sad, anxious, et cetera.
Then, on day two, we make a minor adjustment—all my students and I don the same T-shirts. Each year we create a design together to attract maximum attention. Sometimes the shirt has been neon green. In other years, it’s bright orange or hot pink. On the front is a message that’s a little cheeky, sometimes an in-joke for the class. One year it read, “Everyone at UNC Likes Me!” and another, “Most Popular.” But the T-shirt is not really designed to make us likable. The primary objective is to guarantee an atypical social experience for a single day—to trigger novel transactions. When a few hundred people are walking across campus wearing the same eye-catching attire, we are all guaranteed unusual treatment. People stare, chuckle, or even roll their eyes, and many approach us to ask what the T-shirt means.
What we want to know is how this new treatment changes our own behavior, and maybe e
ven influences how we feel. Again, students are asked to record their own behavior and mood, hour by hour. They then review their data and write a paper about their findings. I ask them to discuss not only the two-day experience, but to hypothesize what their lives would be like if they figuratively wore that distinctive shirt every day.
Students invariably write that they are shocked by how much their own behavior changed on T-shirt day. They are even more surprised to see how those changes created a cascade effect—their behaviors caused others to respond in unexpected ways, which prompted their own uncommon reactions, and so on, in an endless feedback loop. Shy students, for example, approached people they had hoped to talk to for weeks. During these conversations they felt more confident, happy, and optimistic. They were surprised to discover that their peers laughed at their jokes, seemed interested in what they had to say, and even invited them to hang out again.
Angry students, who didn’t usually feel very connected with others on campus, couldn’t believe how often they smiled on the day they wore the T-shirt. To their surprise, others smiled back, and suddenly they didn’t feel as angry or lonely. Some reported that it was the first time in weeks that they had chosen to leave their dorms and go out to mingle with others on Franklin Street, Chapel Hill’s famous strip.
Students who typically stared down at their phones as they walked across campus looked up on that day and offered friendly nods to others as they walked by. Their peers nodded back, and my students reported that they felt an increased sense of community, so much so that they were even more likely to raise their hands in other courses. Overall, the consensus of the members of the class each year is that when the world treated them differently, even just for a day, it changed their behavior and their feelings in surprising ways. One student wrote, “If I wore that T-shirt every day in my childhood, so to speak, I would be a different human being now.”
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