The Science behind “How to Win Friends and Influence People”
Want people to like you? The first step is to take a genuine interest in them … by getting them to talk about themselves.
Dale Carnegie figured this out in the year 1936:
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
75 years later, Harvard neurologists proved why this is – people really do love talking about themselves! Using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, scientists determined that when people talked about their own beliefs that “these acts of self disclosure were accompanied by spurts of heightened activity in brain regions belonging to the meso-limbic dopamine system, which is associated with the sense of reward and satisfaction from food, money or sex.”
Want more details? Refer to this Wall Street Journal article (you may not be authorized to read the text article as the WSJ is a subscription site, but the video at the top of the page is viewable) :
The bottom line:
Our brain loves it when we talk about ourselves. And then our heart loves the person that listened.
Founder and CEO