I plan on compiling a list of academic studies supporting the 48 Laws of Power, and create a video explaining each law and the studies supporting it on my YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5R0IlmBqzpjGS5fsODH2CQ

A common criticism of the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene by many, Kirkus Reviews and Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer included, is that it offers no evidence to support his world view.

I used to just vaguely accept the book, but it was so easy to find studies advocating for each law, even if I was searching for something to contradict it, It has made me think "holy fucking shit. 48 Laws is the real deal." Seriously. If you want to trust any book, so far this one has been a safe bet. It will help you understand people much better than a book like Everybody Wins. This quote from How To Win Friends and Influence People comes to mind.

“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”

I thought I would share my progress so far for your personal reading. I will find a study to support all 48 Laws. When I am complete, I will post the full list and create a video for each. Feel free to contribute studies yourself or criticise anywhere where I fall short.

Law 1. Never outshine the master

The results support the social exchange model of fairness, showing that higher levels of envy and perceived unfairness result in higher levels of interpersonal counterproductive work behavior (Study 1), especially among high self-esteem individuals (Study 2).

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/92/3/666/

We integrate moral disengagement, social identification, and social norms theories to develop, test, and replicate a model that explains how and when envy is associated with social undermining. In Study 1, a two-wave study of hospital employees, results support the prediction that the mediated effect of envy on social undermining behavior through moral disengagement is stronger when employees have low social identification with coworkers. Study 2, a four-wave, multilevel study of student teams, shows that the indirect effect of envy on social undermining through moral disengagement is stronger in teams with low team identification and high team undermining norms.

https://www.polyu.edu.hk/mm/jason/doc/Duffy-Scott-Shaw-Tepper-Aquino%202012%20AMJ.pdf

Humblebragging – bragging masked by a complaint – is a distinct and, given the rise of social media, increasingly ubiquitous form of self-promotion. We show that although people often choose to humblebrag when motivated to make a good impression, it is an ineffective self-promotional strategy. Five studies offer both correlational and causal evidence that humblebragging has both global costs – reducing liking and perceived sincerity – and specific costs: it is even ineffective in signaling the specific trait that that a person wants to promote. Moreover, humblebragging is less effective than simply complaining, because complainers are at least seen as sincere. Despite people’s belief that combining bragging and complaining confers the benefits of both self-promotion strategies, humblebragging fails to pay off.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2597626

Law 2: Never put too much trust in friends, learn how to use enemies

Close friends and relatives, rated nearly equal on closeness, showed very different rates of envy. Envy by close friends was reported nearly three times as often as envy by relatives.

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/whos_the_enviest_of_them_all

Companies that hired people with experience working for rivals in the same industry were the biggest winners. They put up a median return of 182%.

http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Trends/It-s-best-to-hire-from-a-rival-study-shows

Law 4: Always say less than necessary

Since power activates abstraction (e.g., Smith & Trope, 2006), perceivers may expect higher-power individuals to speak more abstractly and therefore will infer that speakers who use more abstract language have a higher degree of power. Across a variety of contexts and conversational subjects in six experiments, participants perceived respondents as more powerful when they used more abstract language (versus more concrete language). Abstract language use appears to affect perceived power because it seems to reflect both a willingness to judge and a general style of abstract thinking.

https://msbfile03.usc.edu/digitalmeasures/wakslak/intellcont/WakslakSmithHan_final-2.docx

Law 5: So much depends on reputation --- guard it with your life!

This ‘stranger’ has an incentive to help if the individual in need of help has previously helped others (indirect reciprocity). The stranger might have observed these actions or heard gossip about them. Evolutionary theory predicts that if the person has helped more often than refused help they have positive image score or reputation and should be helped [33]. For indirect reciprocity, reputation needs to be known; for direct reciprocation of help remembering a face is enough. Any costly investment in others increases a person's reputation. Reputation is a strong driver of cooperation, serving as a currency for future social exchange [87].

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1687/20150100

Law 6: Court Attention At All Costs

Mere-exposure effect

The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. The effect has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds.[1] In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often a person is seen by someone, the more pleasing and likeable that person appears to be.

Gossip is a form of affective information about who is friend and who is foe. We show that gossip does not influence only how a face is evaluated—it affects whether a face is seen in the first place. In two experiments, neutral faces were paired with negative, positive, or neutral gossip and were then presented alone in a binocular rivalry paradigm (faces were presented to one eye, houses to the other). In both studies, faces previously paired with negative (but not positive or neutral) gossip dominated longer in visual consciousness. These findings demonstrate that gossip, as a potent form of social affective learning, can influence vision in a completely top-down manner, independent of the basic structural features of a face.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/332/6036/1446

Can negative information about a product increase sales, and if so, when? Although popular wisdom suggests that “any publicity is good publicity,” prior research has demonstrated only downsides to negative press. Negative reviews or word of mouth, for example, have been found to hurt product evaluation and sales. Using a combination of econometric analysis and experimental methods, we unify these perspectives to delineate contexts under which negative publicity about a product will have positive versus negative effects. Specifically, we argue that negative publicity can increase purchase likelihood and sales by increasing product awareness. Consequently, negative publicity should have differential effects on established versus unknown products. Three studies support this perspective. Whereas a negative review in the New York Times hurt sales of books by well-known authors, for example, it increased sales of books that had lower prior awareness. The studies further underscore the importance of a gap between publicity and purchase occasion and the mediating role of increased awareness in these effects.

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/positive-effects-negative-publicity-when-negative-reviews-increase

Law 9: Win through your actions, never through argument

Backfire effect

The "backfire effect" is a name for the finding that, given evidence against their beliefs, people can reject the evidence and believe even more strongly. The phrase was first coined by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.[Note 1][1] It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning.

An extensive literature addresses citizen ignorance, but very little research focuses on misperceptions. Can these false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? Previous studies have not tested the efficacy of corrections in a realistic format. We conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction. Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf

Context: Misperceptions are a major problem in debates about health care reform and other controversial health issues.

Methods: We conducted an experiment to determine if more aggressive media fact-checking could correct the false belief that the Affordable Care Act would create “death panels.” Participants from an opt-in Internet panel were randomly assigned to either a control group in which they read an article on Sarah Palin’s claims about “death panels” or an intervention group in which the article also contained corrective information refuting Palin.

Findings: The correction reduced belief in death panels and strong opposition to the reform bill among those who view Palin unfavorably and those who view her favorably but have low political knowledge. However, it backfired among politically knowledgeable Palin supporters, who were more likely to believe in death panels and to strongly oppose reform if they received the correction.

Conclusions: These results underscore the difficulty of reducing misperceptions about health care reform among individuals with the motivation and sophistication to reject corrective information.

http://journals.lww.com/lww-medicalcare/Abstract/2013/02000/The_Hazards_of_Correcting_Myths_About_Health_Care.2.aspx

Law 10: Infection --- avoid the unhappy and unlucky

Studies reveal that when people are exposed to emotional facial expressions, they spontaneously react with distinct facial electromyographic (EMG) reactions in emotion-relevant facial muscles. These reactions reflect, in part, a tendency to mimic the facial stimuli. We investigated whether corresponding facial reactions can be elicited when people are unconsciously exposed to happy and angry facial expressions. Through use of the backward-masking technique, the subjects were prevented from consciously perceiving 30-ms exposures of happy, neutral, and angry target faces, which immediately were followed and masked by neutral faces. Despite the fact that exposure to happy and angry faces was unconscious, the subjects reacted with distinct facial muscle reactions that corresponded to the happy and angry stimulus faces. Our results show that both positive and negative emotional reactions can be unconsciously evoked, and particularly that important aspects of emotional face-to-face communication can occur on an unconscious level.

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/11/1/86.short

Recent studies conclude that happiness and depression may be highly contagious across social ties. The results may be biased, however, due to selection and common shocks. We provide unbiased estimates by using exogenous variation from college roommate assignments. Our findings are consistent with at most small contagion effects, with no evidence for happiness contagion, modest evidence for anxiety contagion, and modest evidence for depression contagion among men only.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~daneis/papers/MHcontagion.pdf

Law 12: Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victim

This ‘stranger’ has an incentive to help if the individual in need of help has previously helped others (indirect reciprocity). The stranger might have observed these actions or heard gossip about them. Evolutionary theory predicts that if the person has helped more often than refused help they have positive image score or reputation and should be helped [33]. For indirect reciprocity, reputation needs to be known; for direct reciprocation of help remembering a face is enough. Any costly investment in others increases a person's reputation. Reputation is a strong driver of cooperation, serving as a currency for future social exchange [87].

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1687/20150100

Law 13: When asking for help, appeal to people's self-interest, never to their mercy or gratitude

Human decision making in situations of inequity has long been regarded as a competition between the sense of fairness and self-interest, primarily based on behavioral and neuroimaging studies of inequity that disfavor the actor while favoring others. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments to study refusals and protests using both favoring and disfavoring inequity in three economic exchange games with undercompensating, nearly equal, and overcompensating offers. Refusals of undercompensating offers recruited a heightened activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). Accepting of overcompensating offers recruited significantly higher node activity in, and network activity among, the caudate, the cingulate cortex, and the thalamus. Protesting of undercompensating fixed offers activated the network consisting of the right dlPFC and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and midbrain in the substantia nigra. These findings suggest that perceived fairness and social decisions are the results of coordination between evaluated fairness norms, self-interest, and reward.

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/brain.2014.0243

Strongly influenced by their self-interest, humans do not protest being overcompensated, even when there are no consequences, researchers in Georgia State University’s Brains and Behavior Program have found.

This could imply that humans are less concerned than previously believed about the inequity of others, researchers said. Their findings are published in the journal Brain Connectivity. These findings suggest humans’ sense of unfairness is affected by their self-interest, indicating the interest humans show in others’ outcomes is a recently evolved propensity.

http://news.gsu.edu/2014/08/14/influenced-self-interest-humans-less-concerned-inequity-others-researchers-find/

Law 16: Use absence to increase respect and honor

Many people assume that it is challenging to maintain the intimacy of a long-distance (LD) relationship. However, recent research suggests that LD romantic relationships are of equal or even more trust and satisfaction than their geographically close (GC) counterparts. The present diary study tested an intimacy-enhancing process, in which LD couples (a) engage in more adaptive self-disclosures and (b) form more idealized relationship perceptions than do GC couples in the pursuit of intimacy across various interpersonal media. The results demonstrate the effects of behavioral adaptation and idealization on intimacy, and suggest that the two effects vary depending on the cue multiplicity, synchronicity, and mobility of the communication medium employed. Implications for understanding LD relating and mix-mode relating are discussed.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcom.12029/abstract

In 2 experiments, a total of 200 female undergraduates rated the value and attractiveness of cookies that were either in abundant supply or scarce supply. In the scarce condition, the cookies were either constantly scarce or they began in abundant supply and then decreased. Ss were told that this decrease in supply was either due to an accident or to a high demand for the cookies. In the abundant condition, the cookies were either constantly abundant or first scarce and then abundant. The increase in supply was either due to an accident or to a lack of demand for the cookies. These conditions were crossed with a manipulation in which Ss thought either a high or low number of additional Ss were still to participate in the study. Results indicate that (a) cookies in scarce supply were rated as more desirable than cookies in abundant supply; (b) cookies were rated as more valuable when their supply changed from abundant to scarce than when they were constantly scarce; and (c) cookies scarce because of high demand were rated higher than cookies that were scarce because of an accident. With regard to abundance, cookies that were constantly abundant were rated higher than cookies that began scarce but later became abundant. Results extend commodity theory. Reactance was hypothesized as an intervening process responsible for some of the results. The 2nd study was performed to rule out the possibility that demand characteristics were responsible for the obtained results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/32/5/906/

Law 24: Play The Perfect Courtier

In this study, we examined internship as a recruitment and selection process. On the basis of impression management theory, we hypothesized that both organizations and interns make efforts to impress the other party during the internship if they intend to hire or be hired. Using longitudinal data collected at 3 points from 122 intern–supervisor dyads in the United States, we found that 60% of internships turned into job offers from the host organizations. Interns wishing to be hired were more likely to use self-promotion and ingratiation, which increased the likelihood of job offers. Organizations wishing to hire appeared to be more open to interns' creativity, which increased interns' application intentions. For interns who indicated prior to their internship that they were not interested in working in their host organizations after graduation, supervisory mentoring did not influence their subsequent intentions to apply for full-time employment.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20954757

The goals of this study were to define the psychological and personality characteristics that physicians attribute to their patients and to determine whether these attributions affect treatment decisions. A Physician Attribution Survey was developed to achieve the first goal, and demonstrated that likeability and competence were salient features of the physician-patient relationship. Videotapes were then created demonstrating patients with three different combinations of likeability and competence: likeable-competent (L-C), unlikeable-competent (U-C) and likeable-incompetent (L-I). After being pre-tested with several samples of health professional students, the tapes were shown to 93 primary care physicians. These physicians then completed both a Physician Attribution Survey and a Patient > Management Problem describing their proposed treatment.

There were significant differences in treatment on five of nine treatment dimensions, depending upon the characteristics of the patient. First, the L-C patient would be encouraged significantly more often to telephone and to return more frequently for follow-up than would the L-I or U-C patient. Second, the staff would educate the likeable patients significantly more often than they would the unlikeable patients. Third, the physician would offer significantly more patient education to incompetent patients than to competent ones. Fourth, the unlikeable patient would receive significantly more interviewing regarding the psychological aspects of care than would the likeable patients. Fifth, the L-C patient would receive augmented medication more frequently than either the U-C patient or the L-I patient. There were no differences in the use of the physical examination, referral to staff, frequency of return or hospitalization based on the personal characteristics of the patient, although some of these variables were significantly affected by the attributed disease. There were no interactions between patient characteristics and disease as determinants of management. These findings have implications for medical education, studies of medical decision-making, and assessments of physicians' quality of care of patients. The methods developed provide a basis for more extensive and detailed studies of the explicit and implicit theories physicians have regarding the relationship between the personality characteristics of their patients and treatment decisions.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277953684901643

Leaders frequently form stronger relationships with certain subordinates moreso than others, creating an inner circle of close friendships and an outer circle of more distant relationships. Three studies examine the effects of inner-circle membership on group dynamics and interpersonal influence in hierarchical teams. Study 1 finds that, compared to outer-circle members, inner-circle members feel safer and participate in the group discussion more, and leaders recognize them as making a greater contribution and allocate a larger bonus to them. Consequently, inner-circle members influence the groups' decisions more, and team decision quality improves when inner-circle members possess expert knowledge. Study 2 finds that leaders attended to and recalled suggestions from their inner circle more regardless of argument strength, suggesting heuristic information processing. Study 3 replicates these findings using intact teams in a large governmental agency. Implications for leadership and group decision making are discussed.

http://psp.sagepub.com/content/35/9/1244.short

Law 26: Keep Your Hands Clean

Negativity bias

The negativity bias[1] (also known as the negativity effect) refers to the notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature (e.g. unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions; harmful/traumatic events) have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than do neutral or positive things.

The seminal academic paper here is called “Bad is Stronger Than Good” [pdf]. Roy Baumeister and his colleagues draw on a huge pile of peer-reviewed studies to show that negative information, experiences, and people have far deeper impacts than positive ones. In the context of romantic relationships and marriages, for example, the truth is stark: unless positive interactions outnumber negative interactions by five to one, odds are that the relationship will fail.

https://hbr.org/2010/09/bad-is-stronger-than-good-evid/

Law 27: Play on People’s Need to Believe to Create a Cult like Following

So to find out more, we conducted our own study. We began by collaborating with a respected organization in the telecommunications industry whose leaders scored well above average on most managerial competencies. We identified 33 individuals who scored at or above the 99th percentile on innovation, as measured by their peers, subordinates, and bosses in a comprehensive 360-degree feedback survey. We believed these closest colleagues would have the most accurate view of what made this group of leaders stand out from the pack in this large organization.

You can read the results here: https://archive.is/A8aJu#selection-1363.0-1376.0

Why is it that people follow leaders? We propose in this article that there are at least three motivational grounds for persuading followers to change their organizational behavior: utility, identity, and values. These motivational grounds are sensitive to the national (and corporate) contexts in which leaders operate. Here, we discuss two CEO-led change programs, one in a U.S. company and the other in a Japanese organization. We seek to describe and contrast the motivational bases of the CEOs' change efforts in the two cases and draw attention to the leader approaches in the two national and organizational contexts. In the U.S. case study, leadership was based on the assumption that a “right” agency (in terms of utility sought or values held) will result in the “right” consequences. In Japan, the link from leadership to followership was different: it was assumed that a “right” (corporate) identity will induce “right” behavior on the part of the followers. We propose that further studies consider the follower context in more detail, thus contributing to the understanding of what makes leaders effective in the United States and Japan.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233513132_Why_do_people_follow_leaders_A_study_of_a_US_and_a_Japanese_change_program

Law 30: Make your accomplishments seem effortless

Promises are social contracts that can be broken, kept, or exceeded. Breaking one’s promise is evaluated more negatively than keeping one’s promise. Does expending more effort to exceed a promise lead to equivalently more positive evaluations? Although linear in their outcomes, we expected an asymmetry in evaluations of broken, kept, and exceeded promises. Whereas breaking one's promise is obviously negative compared to keeping a promise, we predicted that exceeding one’s promise would not be evaluated more positively than merely keeping a promise. Three sets of experiments involving hypothetical, recalled, and actual promises support these predictions. A final experiment suggests this asymmetry comes from overvaluing kept promises rather than undervaluing exceeded promises. We suggest this pattern may reflect a general tendency in social systems to discourage selfishness and reward cooperation. Breaking one’s promise is costly, but exceeding it does not appear worth the effort.

http://rady.ucsd.edu/docs/faculty/aGneezy/Promises_SPPS_Print.pdf

Humblebragging – bragging masked by a complaint – is a distinct and, given the rise of social media, increasingly ubiquitous form of self-promotion. We show that although people often choose to humblebrag when motivated to make a good impression, it is an ineffective self-promotional strategy. Five studies offer both correlational and causal evidence that humblebragging has both global costs – reducing liking and perceived sincerity – and specific costs: it is even ineffective in signaling the specific trait that that a person wants to promote. Moreover, humblebragging is less effective than simply complaining, because complainers are at least seen as sincere. Despite people’s belief that combining bragging and complaining confers the benefits of both self-promotion strategies, humblebragging fails to pay off.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2597626

Differences in fourth, sixth, and eighth grade (10-, 12-, and 14-year-old) students' willingness to portray themselves as diligent to their popular peers and teachers and their perceptions of the social value of effort and ability ascriptions were examined. The results revealed that the fourth- and sixth-grade students desired to portray themselves as effortful to teachers and peers, whereas the eighth graders were more reluctant to convey to their popular peers than teachers that they study hard. Consistent with these findings, the fourth graders perceived high effort to increase teacher approval as well as popularity among peers, whereas the eighth graders viewed diligence as facilitating teacher approval but low effort expenditure as improving peer popularity. Reasons for youngsters' changing notions of the social value of achievement ascriptions and their self-presentation tactics in school are discussed.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8556893

Law 32: Play to People's Fantasies

The most popular students in school sometimes are the best liars, according to a study conducted by University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert S. Feldman and published in the most recent Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.

The study found that older adolescents were more adept at deception than the younger ones. Younger or older females were more likely to excel at lying than their male counterparts. Among all ages and genders, those adolescents with the highest level of social competence were the most talented liars. They were able to verbalize untruths while controlling their nonverbal behavior, including facial expression, vocal pitch and mannerisms, posture, and eye contact. Those youths with the poorest social skills had the most trouble controlling their nonverbal behavior when lying.

"This study tells us something about people: It’s unrealistic to expect them to always tell the truth. In fact, it’s not even the way we want people to always behave," Feldman said. "Children are taught at an early age to be polite and say something nice in social situations, even if it’s not the absolute truth. In fact, pretending is part of many children’s and adult’s games."

https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/link-between-lying-and-popularity-found-researcher-umass-amherst

Honesty plays a crucial role in any situation where organisms exchange information or resources. Dishonesty can thus be expected to have damaging effects on social coherence if agents cannot trust the information or goods they receive. However, a distinction is often drawn between prosocial lies (‘white’ lies) and antisocial lying (i.e. deception for personal gain), with the former being considered much less destructive than the latter. We use an agent-based model to show that antisocial lying causes social networks to become increasingly fragmented. Antisocial dishonesty thus places strong constraints on the size and cohesion of social communities, providing a major hurdle that organisms have to overcome (e.g. by evolving counter-deception strategies) in order to evolve large, socially cohesive communities. In contrast, white lies can prove to be beneficial in smoothing the flow of interactions and facilitating a larger, more integrated network. Our results demonstrate that these group-level effects can arise as emergent properties of interactions at the dyadic level. The balance between prosocial and antisocial lies may set constraints on the structure of social networks, and hence the shape of society as a whole.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1790/20141195.abstract

Law 38: Think as you like, but behave like others

In-group favoritism

In-group favoritism, sometimes known as in-group–out-group bias, in-group bias, or intergroup bias, is a pattern of favoring members of one's in-group over out-group members. This can be expressed in evaluation of others, in allocation of resources, and in many other ways.

To explore both of these possibilities, we explicitly studied the relationship between political ideology and trust among a representative US population. In particular, we had paired subjects play a simple trust game with either the same or opposite political identity partner. We found that there are partisan identity-based differences in trusting rates. Whereas Republicans do not exhibit different trust rates between partners of different partisan identities, Democrats trust partners of their own partisan identity more than Republicans. The mechanism that explains this difference seems to be driven by beliefs about partner trustworthiness and not by a taste for discrimination based on partisan identity.

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/16-012_5775a007-2276-45da-bde4-4b5d495b5712.pdf

A new study suggests including religion in campaign speeches feeds a belief that those who are religious to some extent are trustworthy and viewed more favorably. The study was conducted by Scott Clifford of the University of Houston Department of Political Science and Ben Gaskins of Lewis & Clark College.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160105134058.htm (After this, in the video I plan to show the high rates of people who are religious in the United States, where the study was conducted)

Group polarization occurs when people's attitudes become more extreme following discussion with like-minded others. We hypothesized that people underestimate how much a relatively brief group discussion polarizes their own attitudes. People often perceive their own attitudes as unbiased and stable over time. Therefore, people's polarized post-discussion attitudes may cause them to misremember their pre-discussion attitudes as having been more extreme than they were. In two experiments, participants engaged in 15-minute discussions with 4–6 like-minded others regarding two political topics: whether Barack Obama or George W. Bush was the better president (Experiment 1) and whether they supported Barack Obama or Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential election (Experiment 2). Group discussion polarized participants' attitudes, and participants misremembered their pre-discussion attitudes as having been more extreme than they actually were. Participants' polarized post-discussion attitudes significantly predicted their recalled pre-discussion attitudes, controlling for their actual pre-discussion attitudes, suggesting that their post-discussion attitudes guided reconstruction of their pre-discussion attitudes. These findings have implications for people's awareness of psychological biases and for the societal effects of partisan enclavement.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103116301457

Law 45: Preach the need for change, but never reform too much at once!

Status quo bias

Status quo bias is an emotional bias; a preference for the current state of affairs. The current baseline (or status quo) is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss. Status quo bias should be distinguished from a rational preference for the status quo ante, as when the current state of affairs is objectively superior to the available alternatives, or when imperfect information is a significant problem. A large body of evidence, however, shows that status quo bias frequently affects human decision-making.

The longer something is thought to exist, the better it is evaluated. In Study 1, participants preferred an existing university requirement over an alternative; this pattern was more pronounced when the existing requirement was said to be in place for a longer period of time. In Study 2, participants rated acupuncture more favorably as a function of how old the practice was described. Aesthetic judgments of art (Study 3) and nature (Study 4) were also positively affected by time in existence, as were gustatory evaluations of an edible consumer good (Study 5). Features of the research designs argue against mere exposure, loss aversion, and rational inference as explanations for these findings. Instead, time in existence seems to operate as a heuristic; longer means better.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103110001599

Change aversion is a natural response, which technology often exacerbates. Evolutionary changes can be subtle and occur over many generations. But Internet users must sometimes deal with sudden, significant product changes to applications they rely on and identify with. Despite the best intentions of designers and product managers, users often experience anxiety and confusion when faced with a new interface or changed functionality. While some change aversion is often inevitable, it can also be managed and minimized with the right steps. This case study describes how our understanding of change aversion helped minimize negative effects for the transition of the Google Docs List to Google Drive, a product for file storage in the cloud. We describe actions that allowed for a launch with no aversion.

http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41221.html

Law 46: Never appear too perfect! --- Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity!

Pratfall effect

In social psychology, the pratfall effect is the tendency for attractiveness to increase or decrease after an individual makes a mistake, depending on the individual's perceived ability to perform well in a general sense. A perceived able individual would be, on average, more likable after committing a blunder, while the opposite would occur if a perceived average person makes a mistake.

An experiment was performed which demonstrated that the attractiveness of a superior person is enhanced if he commits a clumsy blunder; the same blunder tends to decrease the the attractiveness of a mediocre person. We predicted these results by conjecturing that a superior person may be viewed as superhuman and, therefore, distant; a blunder tends to. humanize him and, consequently, increases his attractiveness.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/bf03342263

Law 47: Do not go past the mark you aimed for --- in victory, learn when to stop!

Promises are social contracts that can be broken, kept, or exceeded. Breaking one’s promise is evaluated more negatively than keeping one’s promise. Does expending more effort to exceed a promise lead to equivalently more positive evaluations? Although linear in their outcomes, we expected an asymmetry in evaluations of broken, kept, and exceeded promises. Whereas breaking one’s promise is obviously negative compared to keeping a promise, we predicted that exceeding one’s promise would not be evaluated more positively than merely keeping a promise. Three sets of experiments involving hypothetical, recalled, and actual promises support these predictions. A final experiment suggests this asymmetry comes from overvaluing kept promises rather than undervaluing exceeded promises. We suggest this pattern may reflect a general tendency in social systems to discourage selfishness and reward cooperation. Breaking one’s promise is costly, but exceeding it does not appear worth the effort.

http://rady.ucsd.edu/docs/faculty/aGneezy/Promises_SPPS_Print.pdf