How to Turn Your Work Enemy Into Your Work Friend
Behavioral psychologists have known about “the Ben Franklin effect” for decades, but here’s how to use favors to make people like you; and to make yourself like them
If there’s one thing we can learn from HBO’s Succession, it’s that sometimes we must break bread with our enemies. We must sit in meetings with people who have been promoted over us. We must make billion-dollar deals with people who want to destroy us. We must foot the bill for the wedding of the beautiful, cold-as-ice daughter who has joined forces with our political rival. (We must also wear incredible sweaters and gruffly say “fuck auff” a lot.)
For times like those, there’s the “Ben Franklin effect.”
In 1737, Benjamin Franklin was re-appointed as a clerk of the General Assembly. “When I was again propos’d, a new member made a long speech against me, in order to favour some other candidate,” Franklin wrote in his memoir, walloping me with unearned nostalgia for a time when barrel-bellied politicians shat on each other in long, well-composed speeches instead of manic tweets sent from gilded tubs.
The member was, Franklin wrote, “a gentleman of fortune and education, with talents that were likely to give him, in…
