Contact and Cooperation
For the most part, we like things that are familiar to us.^9 To prove the
point to yourself, try a little experiment. Get the negative of an old
photograph that shows a front view of your face and have it developed
into a pair of pictures—one that shows you as you actually look and
one that shows a reverse image (so that the right and left sides of your
face are interchanged). Now decide which version of your face you like
better and ask a good friend to make the choice, too. If you are at all
like a group of Milwaukee women on whom this procedure was tried,
you should notice something odd: Your friend will prefer the true print,
but you will prefer the reverse image. Why? Because you both will be
responding favorably to the more familiar face—your friend to the one
the world sees, and you to the transposed one you find in the mirror
every day.^10
Because of its effect on liking, familiarity plays a role in decisions
about all sorts of things, including the politicians we elect. It appears
that in an election booth voters often choose a candidate merely because
the name seems familiar. In one controversial Ohio election a few years
ago, a man given little chance of winning the state attorney-general race
swept to victory when, shortly before the election, he changed his name
to Brown—a family name of much Ohio political tradition.^11
How could such a thing happen? The answer lies partially in the
unconscious way that familiarity affects liking. Often we don’t realize
that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number
of times we have been exposed to it in the past. For example, in one
experiment, the faces of several individuals were flashed on a screen
so quickly that later on, the subjects who were exposed to the faces in
this manner couldn’t recall having seen any of them before. Yet, the
more frequently a person’s face was flashed on the screen, the more
these subjects came to like that person when they met in a subsequent
interaction. And because greater liking leads to greater social influence,
these subjects were also more persuaded by the opinion statements of
the individuals whose faces had appeared on the screen most fre-
quently.^12
On the basis of evidence that we are more favorable toward the things
we have had contact with, some people have recommended a “contact”
approach to improving race relations. They argue that simply by
providing individuals of different ethnic background with more expos-
ure to one another as equals, those individuals will naturally come to
like each other better. However, when scientists have examined school
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 133