… to decide whether you like or trust the person, say researchers. Snap judgments happen  without conscious thought. Yet another part of the study has scarier implications for forging relationships. When participants were given more time to describe their reactions they were:

   •  Slightly more negative than those given less time.

   •  More certain that they were right in their quick judgment.

And from a study on Facebook called YouJustGetMe, in viewing photos, people are

 “generally seen by others as they see themselves.”

How to Cultivate Friendship and Attract Support

From these findings, for a first meeting to flourish, in person or online, into a positive relationship, two people must feel positive about each other upfront and over time during that first “meeting”.  Only then can you enjoy the Positively Mutually-Reinforcing Effect.  That’s when we prove each other right – that we are trustworthy and likeable – for each other. 

Since no human interactions are neutral, the alternative is the Negatively Mutually-Reinforcing Effect.  That’s when one or both us don’t like or trust each other at first.  Consequently we become self-protective and spiral down in the mutually-reinforcing behaviors that prove ourselves right.

 People Like People Who Like Them

How to start out on the right foot in person?  From other research here’s a counter-intuitive discovery. Most of us, when meeting someone we think is important to us, attempt to appear likeable, important and trustworthy. Our behavior is often self-referencing.  Yet the best way for others to like you is for them to like the way they are when around you. 

If they don’t like the way they act and feel when around you, they project onto you the qualities they most dislike  – even if you haven’t demonstrated you have those traits.  They are inclined to sabotage you  – even if such behavior also damages them. 

Alternatively, if they like the way they are when around you, they see in you the qualities they most admire.  Yep.  Even if you’ve not (yet) demonstrated that you have those wonderful qualities. Plus they’ll go out of their way to speak well of you and help you, even to their own detriment.

So, for an easier, more joyful life  - with others – make it a habit when you first meet someone to search for the quality in that person you most like and admire. Focus your attention on that trait, not something that bothers you. Your positive feeling will be reflected in your face, body language and tone. Speak to that positive view. In so doing, you are most likely to instigate a pleasant interaction at the least and, at the most, a healthy give-and-take friendship. Then explore more ways to deepen that connection.

If you are, google wants to place ads on your blog or the profile page on the social network(s) to which you belong.  Last month, google filed a patent that will help the company find key influencers in each network.

How will google find you?  See the steps in this helpful diagram by social network analysis scientist Valdis Krebs. Then, if the power of network analysis captures your attention, read Krebs’ and Roger Cohen’s thoughts about Obama’s use of grass-roots networks.  See Krebs’ ideas and work on:

• Uncloaking some terrorist networks

• Supporting affordable housing

• Tracking the spread of a disease

•  What books liberals and conservatives are buying. Krebs found that, “the old conservatives have more overlap with the progressives than they do with the neo-cons.”

One, perhaps obvious conclusion from all this network analysis is the Allen Curve: proximity creates opportunities for serendipitous interaction.  That is, “those close by, form a tie.”

In the study I dub “Are you powerful or not?” I’d be in a third category. Why? Because I felt insulted when instructed to do what researchers asked of students. At Northwestern and Stanford, no less. Here’s what happened. Two professors, Adam Galinsky and Joe Magee divided undergrads into two groups.

One group was primed to feel powerful. They were asked to write about a situation in which they had authority over another individual. The members of the second group were set up to feel subordinate. They were asked to write about a situation in which they had little power.

All participants were then asked to act quickly. Using their dominant hand they were to:
1. Snap their fingers five times, then
2. Pick up a non-toxic marker and write a capital E on their foreheads. This is the part I resisted. (Must be an authority thing.)

They were told that the “E” would be washed off after the experiment. (Further down you’ll read about what happened when some presumably powerful people at a fancy gathering were asked to do something similar.)

Here’s what researchers wanted to watch. There are two ways to draw the “E”. One is to draw the prongs of the letter so that the person drawing it can read it. The researchers believe people who write it this way are “self-oriented.” Conversely, if you wrote the “E” the other way, with the prongs pointing in the opposite direction you must be “other-oriented.” You are helping others to read the “E” you scrawled on your forehead.

The researchers discovered that the group primed to feel powerful was “ almost three times as likely as the low-power group to draw an “E” that would be illegible to anyone but them.”

Their key research conclusion:
The more power a person has, the less capacity he has to take another person’s perspective. In fact, Magee found that as some people secure more power they become “disinhibited.” That may have been what happened to Eliot Spitzer and Bill Clinton, for instance.

I must confess that I was a participant when this study was conducted again later. Unfortunately, there’s another sign of my being in a third, perhaps deviant category. After I was finally persuaded to write that “E” the researchers were discomforted to find that no one – not even me – could read my “writing.” One other participant drew a letter that no one could identify. He’s a self-described “extreme introvert.”

Later I learned of two other resisters. Kristen Wiig and Amy Poehler from “Saturday Night Live” were the only ones who refused to participate when this experiment was conducted by a persuasive “amateur” the New Yorker’s Lauren Collins. She went to the Time 100 banquet, held at Lincoln Center celebrating “the most influential people in the world.” In the middle of this social gathering they “just” had to mark a yellow Post-it and put it on their forehead.

Guess which one of these three wrote the powerful “E”: the gossip columnist, Liz Smith; former Deputy Secretary of Defense and deposed World Bank president, Paul Wolfowitz or chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein?

Sardonic suggestion:
Now if you do NOT want to build unity at your conference or other group meeting, try this. Tout the “E” experiment as a team-building exercise. Afterwards, point out the individuals in the group who appear powerful (thus less thoughtful of others) and those who do not. Then ask them to talk about how they feel abut their label, relative to others. That’s a non – Me2We experience.

Who knows? Some of us women might feel guilty for being powerful yet not empathetic. And some men might feel uncomfortable when placed in the less powerful category, even if they are also labeled as thoughtful of others.

Here’s a more upbeat finding. Do “self-centered”, ruthless people really rise in power? Not always. Social and emotional intelligence can trump ruthless manipulation suggests Washington Post’s Shankar Vedantam who points to The Power Paradox, research led by Dacher Keltner. From the moral angle, Steven Pinker seems to agree.

Want to learn more by participating in a study?

If this kind of research interests you, then become a participant in a study that, examines, “how people view ideas such as altruism, heroism, and other helping behaviors” led by Dr. Philip Zimbardo. Simply fill out a survey that takes 15-30 minutes to complete.

When we first fall for someone, we become enamored with everything about that person. We gush. We create things to commemorate their specialness. We feel so connected, we fill in the blanks about what we don’t know. We assume we will like the rest of that person just as much. That’s just human.

If we then fall in love, then that early, rosy view of the adored one’s perfection may last just six months. That’s why Democrats who, (like MIT’s Henry Jenkins and behavioral-economist Dan Ariely) believe there’s a fan-like fervor felt by many Obama supporters, have reason to worry the longer this “bitter” Clinton vs. Obama battle rages on. Then there’s the “familiarity” problem. What sways you?

Here’s five quick lessons we can glean from this Fandom Effect for making wiser choices in our work and our social and personal lives. When you are drawn to someone you’ve just met, remind yourself of these phenomena:

1. People Like People Who Seem Like Them
Two suggestions:

• Define Yourself Before Others Do.
Years ago, I recall a radio commentator saying, “Presidential candidate George W. Bush will be active in making pronouncements in the coming weeks. He wants to define himself before his opponents do it for him.” (Don’t we all.)

You can bring out the best side in others as you attract them to you, starting with how you define yourself for them. Here’s how. Demonstrate the part of you that is most like the person you are around. Then you will feel positively familiar to that person and he will project onto you the qualities he likes in himself and thus be more likely to like you.

• You’ll Prove Yourself Right…at First
Conversely, the more you like someone you’ve just seen or met, the more you’ll magnify in your mind the qualities you like. Plus you’ll blind to those qualities that are discordant with yours. Men, tend “to trust people who’re part of a group with them” while women are “more likely to trust strangers who share some personal connection, such as a friend of a friend.”

2. Recognize the “Confirmation Bias”: Ah, He Acts Right – Like Me
To confirm your initial perception, you will seek and find in what that person says and does, the reinforcing evidence that the person feels and thinks like you.

3. Deepen Which the Ruts in the Roads of Your Brain Maps?
The more actions you take on behalf of that initial positive view, the more deeply you will believe and defend that view. Whatever you most remember, repeat and practice become your strongest beliefs and habits. Because of the brain’s extreme plasticity, we now know we’re capable of remarkable changes in belief, health and behavior – at any age.

Recognize, by the way, that the opposite effect – reaction against someone – is a stronger, felt emotion. That is, if you instinctively dislike someone you just saw or met you will react sooner and more intensely against that person than if the first feeling was positive. Plus you’ll also look for confirming evidence. It is more difficult to change from a negative to a positive feeling than vice versa.

4. Don’t’ Be Stopped by the Feet of Clay Effect
The more actions you have taken in support of that wonderful person, the more upset or even betrayed you feel when that inevitable point comes – when that special person doesn’t act “right” like you. He exhibits either a conflicting opinion or way of behaving. Your hero has feet of clay, as do you.

5. Find the Sweet Spot From Which to Build a Mutually-Beneficial Relationship

That is the relationship’s first turning point. Now that you can see more of the whole person, you tend to flip, focusing more on what you don’t like than what you do. It is the brain’s naturally protective mechanism.

You usually have two choices.
• You can continue to focus on what you don’t like in the person, finding confirming evidence, and spiral down into more reaction and conflict until your views harden and the relationship dissolves.

• Or you can look at the size of the sweet spot of mutual interests – where kindred feelings and values coincide.

Is that sweet spot sizable enough to cultivate, and continue? Then speak candidly to that area of mutual benefit, in your conversations with that formerly special person. Does that other person see that sweet spot as you do?

Then there’s hope. Your shared time together is not for naught. You both recognize that you’ve built the foundation for growing the relationship. Your differences in temperament and talents can serve you both. Bonus benefit? Just ten minutes of positive interaction with another person can improve your memory and mental acuity.

Both of you can experience the upside of being unlikely friends rather than the downside of mismatched, former friends, lovers or partners. Next step? Pledge to keep a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions (or better) with each other. If this ratio is an accurate predictor of happy marriages then it’s probably a reliable indicator for other kinds of healthy relationships. Bonus? You’ll become more resilient.

• Life Favors the Optimistic So Learn to Be More So

Since it appears we are each born with an emotional set point, along the range between being deeply pessimistic to invariably optimistic, it pays to know where you are on that continuum. If you tend to be negative, for example, you are probably hard on yourself and chided by others about being downbeat.

For you, the relationship-building, life-affirming, success-attracting approach odescribed above is especially arduous. But you can make it easier, research shows. Here are three tools that have helped me:

1. Discover your set point and then practice ways to be more resilient and upbeat by reading Marty Seligman’s Learned Optimism and taking the test. (Hint: pessimistic people see a present problem as pervasive, personal and permanent).

2. Then gain clarity about your strongest talents and most attractive temperament so you can recognize the kind of work activities at which you excel and the people with complementary talents and temperament – so you and the people close to you can become happier and higher-performing. To discover your strengths, read Marcus Buckingham’s Now Discover Your Strengths and take the related test.

3. To put the insights from the above two books to work in forging positive, productive relationships with others, learn the approach taught in my ebook, LikeAbility. Contact me if you’d like a copy of this $15 ebook.

… of their faces it seems. And that’s all. College students were shown head shots of CEOs at the bottom and top of the Fortune 1000 list. Even without knowing the CEOs’ names, companies or any other background they “naively” guessed which people led the most profitable companies. For example, Warren Buffett and the relatively less successful Bill Ford.

This is especially surprisingly because (you guessed it) all of the CEOs looked pretty much the same. White. Male. Late middled-aged.

That’s what social psychologists Nalini Ambady, Nicholas Rule and their team at Tufts discovered. I wonder how it feels to be a non-Caucasian female, leading this study?

Chicken or egg puzzle here of what came first – a successful-looking CEO or a successful career? And what can we learn to look like powerful leaders, regarding of our work or life? No clear answers there it appears yet here’s some more tidbits from the study.

• Based only on the photos, one half of the students were asked how good they thought each person was at leading a company. They accurately guessed which CEOs where in the top 25 companies and which were leading the bottom 25. The other half of the students were asked to rate the CEOs for five personality traits:

Power:
1. Competence
2. Dominance
3. Facial maturity (had an adult-looking face or a baby-face)

Warmth:
5. Likeability
6. Trustworthiness

• The CEOs rated most highly for the “power” traits are running the most profitable companies.

• The “ignorant” students who knew nothing about the CEOs nor their companies, “are more accurate in their assessments than well-informed professionals” who are familiar with the leaders and their companies.

• Unfortunately for some, a CEO’s “warmth” (likeability and trustworthiness) had no connection to his company’s profits.

• Also, unfortunately, researchers didn’t ask participants why they thought one CEO looked more competent or trustworthy than another. They were just measuring gut instinctual judgments.

• One comforting conclusion for us in situations where we are ignorant? We are good guessers at who has the most power in an organization or situation – just by viewing photos of the faces of the people involved or (from another Ambady study) fleeting video images of them. However, we’re often less accurate at guessing in person.

…looks like you, research shows. So if you are leaning toward one political (or marital?) candidate or have not yet decided, here’s how you might be influenced. “Morphing faces”- based research demonstrates your instinctive tendency to like the person who looks right – like you.

Smart Mobs author and Stanford professor, Howard Rheingold has been tracking the research for several years as it has appeared in peer-researched journals. According to Rheingold, “The finding is simple — using the same morphing software you can buy online for twenty or thirty dollars, researchers morphed subjects’ faces into the photographs of political candidates. Without knowing that their own faces had been incorporated, potential voters who either weakly favored one candidate or had not yet made a decision decided to choose the candidate that subliminally resembled themselves — even though they were not told about the morphing until after they made their choices. Candidates can be made to look more caucasian, asian, etc. — depending, I presume, on the precinct:

…a Bailenson experiment done before the 2004 election in collaboration with Shanto Lyengar, director of Stanford’s Political Communication Lab, partially morphed the photos of undecided voters with those of either George Bush or John Kerry. Voters preferred the candidate they’d been morphed into—but could not consciously detect that the photo contained their own face.”

While it is not surprising to learn that we tend to like the people who look most familiar to us, this finding has huge implications in the presidential campaign. Not only do we have a black and a woman candidate but there’s an extreme variation in the facial types of all candidates. In this Stanford magazine article, see “Electable Like Me” under the section “One last Experiment.”

Back to how this finding affects us in everyday life, here are two additional insights:

Peter Kaminski suggests this additional possibility: “I’ll bet familial similarity is similarly strong as similarity to the subject her/himself, and that familial similarity would be stronger than ethnic similarity. So I wonder how useful morphing per precinct/ethnicity would be. It would be interesting to see results from familial morphs — sibling/same gender, sibling/opposite gender, mother, father, etc. And partner/spouse.”

Alex Halvais predicts that, “Faces that approach an eigenface are more likely to be judged attractive. The face that contains all faces is probably the most electable face of all.”

The porn industry is usually an early adopter of new media technologies. Not sticking with “just” tawdry sex shops in the tenderloin. Nope. Customers can download naked images in the privacy of their home or the semi-privacy of their hotel room. That means ever higher profits margins for purveyors of pornography, thus pulling middle-class entrepreneurs into the business.

On NPR’s On the Media, the sex and technology correspondent for Wired.com, Regina Lynn sees big changes ahead. Via Henry Jenkins, “Here’s how Lynn describes how web 2.0 software (based on social networks and user-generated or manipulated content) might reshape our relationship with pornography:
‘Anything from rating the content, allowing users to take existing content and mash it up and create new movies and things, contests – you know, everybody make a minute-and-a-half porn movie out of all of this material. They add a bit of play and a bit of game and just a lot of interaction into it. I mean, it’s basically taking porn and making it relationships.’”

Yet these operators have been slow to adopt the interactive social media tools of Web.20. Why? Says Lyn, “For the main industry, it’s really hard to incorporate that because you’ve got to think a whole new way. You have to think of your users with respect and as sort of partners in the whole experience versus sheep that you’re fleecing.’” Then there’s those worrysome legal concerns mentioned later on in this interview with Brooke Gladstone.

Meanwhile, many of us “consumers”are yearning for more Internet connectivity it appears. While most may not admit to a porn habit a remarkably high number of Americans (one in four) said they’d settle for the Internet as “a stand-in for a significant other for a period of time.” And a higher 31 percent of singles agreed in a poll released this month by Zogby International and 463 Communications.

There’s more. If it could be done safely, a remarkable 11 percent of those surveyed would be willing to have brain implants that would allow them to access the Internet with their minds or that enables them to track their children’s locations.

It gets worse. Many think government censorship of online video content is acceptable. Plus they believe that the Internet makes them feel closer to God and less close their significant ones. Yet their own identities on the Internet are not very important to them. So much for “Smart” Mobs converging on this desire.