marriage: “She said she liked me.” Although designed for a laugh, the
remark is as much instructive as humorous. The information that
someone fancies us can be a bewitchingly effective device for producing
return liking and willing compliance. So, often in terms of flattery or
simple claims of affinity, we hear positive estimation from people who
want something from us.
Remember Joe Girard, the world’s “greatest car salesman,” who says
the secret of his success was getting customers to like him? He did
something that, on the face of it, seems foolish and costly. Each month
he sent every one of his more than thirteen thousand former customers
a holiday greeting card containing a personal message. The holiday
greeting changed from month to month (Happy New Year or Happy
Thanksgiving, etc.), but the message printed on the face of the card
never varied. It read, “I like you.” As Joe explained it, “There’s nothing
else on the card. Nothin’ but my name. I’m just telling ’em that I like
’em.”
“I like you.” It came in the mail every year, twelve times a year, like
clockwork. “I like you,” on a printed card that went off to thirteen
thousand other people, too. Could a statement of liking so impersonal,
so obviously designed to sell cars, really work? Joe Girard thinks so;
and a man as successful as he was at what he did deserves our attention.
Joe understands an important fact about human nature: We are phe-
nomenal suckers for flattery. Although there are limits to our gullibil-
ity—especially when we can be sure that the flatterer is trying to manip-
ulate us—we tend, as a rule, to believe praise and to like those who
provide it, oftentimes when it is clearly false.
An experiment done on men in North Carolina shows how helpless
we can be in the face of praise. The men in the study received comments
about themselves from another person who needed a favor from them.
Some of the men got only positive comments, some got only negative
comments, and some got a mixture of good and bad. There were three
interesting findings. First, the evaluator who provided only praise was
liked best by the men. Second, this was the case even though the men
fully realized that the flatterer stood to gain from their liking him. Fi-
nally, unlike the other types of comments, pure praise did not have to
be accurate to work. Positive comments produced just as much liking
for the flatterer when they were untrue as when they were true.^8
Apparently we have such an automatically positive reaction to com-
pliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious
attempt to win our favor. Click, whirr. When seen in this light, the ex-
pense of printing and mailing well over 150,000 “I like you” cards each
year seems neither as foolish nor as costly as before.
132 / Influence