Franklin, B. (1791–1868). The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. First published in French, Paris: Buisson, 1791 (Part One only); Parts One to Three, London, 1818; complete, ed. J. Bigelow, 1868. Project Gutenberg edition (Harvard Classics, ed. C. W. Eliot, 1909), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/148.
Read in full on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1360).
Why this is here
The exchange’s opening turns asked what the Ben Franklin effect is, and this is its source. The owner read the favour as a “perspectival invitation”: asking for one invites the other to act toward you before they have an interpretation of you, and the interpretation follows the act. That is the shape of CLAIM-275 (an intervention can come before the interpretation it makes available). The exchange also set it beside CLAIM-417, CLAIM-297, CLAIM-330, CLAIM-404 and CLAIM-362.
No disagreement with the exchange: the text bears out the borrowed-book story as told. Franklin himself gives the mechanism as an “old maxim” and a lesson in prudence (“how much more profitable it is prudently to remove, than to resent”), not as a claim about how liking forms.