Give someone something
today and they'll remember it forever. It's true, favors buy power. The Italian
Mafia did it, lobbyists still do it, and the concept has been shown to work numerous
times. People have a tendency to repay favors, It's only human nature. Sometimes, people
repay favors by doing favors even greater than the ones you did for them. It
can almost be thought of as payment plus interest.
By doing favors constantly,
you can get people to do random crap for you, right? Essentially, yes.
According to a social experiment done by Dennis Regan in 1971, [1] the force of reciprocity (exchanging
things for benefit), is so strong, that most people feel obliged to repay
favors from people, even if they don't like the person who originally did the
favor in the first place. But of course, there are always some exceptions.
[1] Regan, R. T. (1971). "Effects of a favor and liking
on compliance". Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 7: 627–639.
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