The Ben Franklin effect is a proposed psychological phenomenon: people like someone more after doing a favour for them. An explanation for this is cognitive dissonance. People reason that they help others because they like them, even if they do not, because their minds struggle to maintain logical consistency between their actions and perceptions. The Benjamin Franklin effect, in other words, is the result of one's concept of self coming under attack. Every person develops a persona, and that persona persists because inconsistencies in one's personal narrative get rewritten, redacted, and misinterpreted. Franklin's observation of effect Benjamin Franklin, after whom the effect is named, quoted what he described as an "old maxim" in his autobiography: "He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged." In his autobiography, Franklin explains how he dealt with the animosity of a rival legislator when he served in the Pennsylvania legislature in the 18th century: Research The initial study of the effect was done by Jecker and Landy in 1969, in which students were invited to take part in a Q&A competition run by the researcher in which they could win sums of money. After this competition was over, one-third of the students who had "won" were approached by the researcher, who asked them to return the money on the grounds that he had used his own funds to pay the winners and was running short of money now; another third were asked by a secretary to return the money because it was from the psychology department and funds were low; another third were not at all approached. All three groups were then asked how much they liked the researcher. The second group liked him the least, the first group the mostsuggesting that a refund request by an intermediary had decreased their liking, while a direct request had increased their liking. In 1971, University of North Carolina psychologists John Schopler and John Compere carried out the following experiment: They had their subjects administer learning tests to accomplices pretending to be other students. The subjects were told the learners would watch as the teachers used sticks to tap out long patterns on a series of wooden cubes. The learners would then be asked to repeat the patterns. Each teacher was to try out two different methods on two different people, one at