Contribution
The book is the source of the Benjamin Franklin effect, and the record holds it for that one page (CASE-143). Read whole, it is a manual of influence written as a life: a self-made printer explains to his son, and then to the public, the means by which he rose and carried his projects. What it gives the record beyond the anecdote is a run of first-hand, named instances of the same technique, of getting people to act before they have settled what they think of the actor.
Key insight
Franklin works on the conditions of other people’s judgement more than on the judgement. He hides his authorship, lets an idea appear to arise in many places at once, leads opponents into concessions by questions, makes the first move with a request instead of a defence, and keeps up appearances as carefully as the realities (“I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances to the contrary”). He says what this costs him: “If it remains a while uncertain to whom the merit belongs, some one more vain than yourself will be encouraged to claim it”.
Assumptions
Not a theory, so there are no formal conditions. What the instances assume:
- Reputation is built from what others can see. The industry “visible to our neighbors, began to give us character and credit”; Dr. Baird’s remark at the merchants’ club is reported as the turn.
- Authorship provokes resistance. “the impropriety of presenting one’s self as the proposer of any useful project, that might be suppos’d to raise one’s reputation in the smallest degree above that of one’s neighbors”.
- Dogmatic speech provokes contradiction. A “positive, assuming manner” “tends to create opposition”.
Key results
The memoir reports; these are its instances, with where they fall.
- The borrowed book (Part Three, written from August 1788). Chosen clerk of the General Assembly in 1736; the next year “a new member made a long speech against me”. Franklin “did not, however, aim at gaining his favour by paying any servile respect to him, but, after some time, took this other method”: he asked by note to borrow “a certain very scarce and curious book”, returned it “in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favour”. At their next meeting in the House “he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.” Franklin: “This is another instance of the truth of an old maxim I had learned, which says, ‘He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.’ And it shows how much more profitable it is prudently to remove, than to resent, return, and continue inimical proceedings.” The member is not named. The motive is stated just before: the clerkship “secur’d to me the business of printing the votes, laws, paper money”.
- Hiding authorship. The subscription library was “a scheme of a number of friends”; “I ever after practis’d it on such occasions”; the academy’s proposals likewise.
- Plurality made to order. Each Junto member was to form a subordinate club “without informing them of the connection with the Junto”, partly for “our power of doing good by spreading thro’ the several clubs the sentiments of the Junto”. The watch reform was “communicated to the other clubs, but as arising in each of them”, and “by preparing the minds of people for the change, it paved the way for the law”.
- Preparing opinion in print. For the hospital, “I endeavoured to prepare the minds of the people by writing on the subject in the newspapers, which was my usual custom in such cases”; likewise Plain Truth before the defence association and the academy pamphlet before its subscription.
- Matching grant. The hospital bill made £2,000 of public money conditional on an equal private sum, so that opponents had “the credit of being charitable without the expence” and donors saw “every man’s donation would be doubled”; “I more easily excus’d myself for having made some use of cunning.”
- Showing the list. His advice to Gilbert Tennent: apply first to those sure to give, then “show them the list of those who have given” to the uncertain.
- Modest diffidence. From the Socratic method, kept “only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence”; after the Quaker friend’s rebuke, “I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own”, and “I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong”. He claims “a good deal” of success “with regard to the appearance” of humility and little in its reality.
- The art of virtue. Thirteen virtues, one attended to per week, with faults marked as spots in a ruled book; “I was surpris’d to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined”. Order “gave me the most trouble”; he never reached the perfection he aimed at, “but was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man”.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | A hostile member, asked to lend a book, became civil and then a lifelong friend | weak | one first-hand anecdote, written about fifty years after the event |
| C2 | One who has done you a kindness is readier to do another than one you have obliged | weak | given as an “old maxim”, supported by C1 |
| C3 | Presenting a project as others’ meets less resistance than presenting it as one’s own | weak | his practice, “from my frequent successes” |
| C4 | Modest, undogmatic expression wins readier reception and less contradiction | weak | his practice and its claimed effect on his influence |
| C5 | Opinion prepared in print, and spread through clubs “as arising in each of them”, eases a later measure | weak | the watch, the hospital, the association |
Concepts
- Erratum: his word for a fault in his conduct, borrowed from printing, which a life lived again would “correct”.
- The Junto: his club of mutual improvement, with queries and essays, and “all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction” made “contraband”.
- The art of virtue: a means of acquiring virtue, as against “the mere exhortation to be good”.
Connections
Jecker and Landy (LIT-1419, Deferred) tested the anecdote’s effect in the laboratory; the memoir offers it only as a maxim confirmed once. The Junto’s satellite clubs, ideas “arising in each of them”, are a documented case of manufactured attributed plurality: the circulation the hyperstition interview (LIT-1396, NOTE-1378) names, and what CLAIM-425 says should not stand in for grounds. Soros’s two functions (LIT-1397, NOTE-1362) fit Franklin’s printing exactly: his paper and pamphlets were at once his report of opinion and his means of moving it.
Bearing on the record
- CASE-143 tells the anecdote as the text does. One detail could be sharpened: Franklin says the opposing member was “a gentleman of fortune and education, with talents that were likely to give him, in time, great influence in the House”, and that his reason for winning him over was the profit of the clerkship. The case’s standing as the anecdote’s is right; the text gives no name for the member.
- CLAIM-275 (an intervention can come before the interpretation it makes available). The anecdote fits, but Franklin’s own account of why it worked is the maxim, not an interpretation following an act, and the text says nothing about what the member came to think. Read closely, it supports the claim’s shape and does not show its mechanism.
- CLAIM-425 and CLAIM-426. The satellite clubs and the newspaper pieces that “prepare the minds of the people” are first-hand cases in which a judgement’s circulation was arranged so that it would bring about what it said. Franklin arranged the appearance of plurality (“as arising in each of them”), which is the “attributed plurality” CLAIM-425 discounts and CLAIM-426 keeps as evidence about the future. A proposed dated note for CLAIM-426 is in the coordinator’s report.
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- A memoir written decades after the events, for posterity and to instruct; Franklin says the book may “gratify my own vanity” and that pride “will every now and then peep out”.
- Part Three was written “at home, August, 1788” without “the help expected from my papers, many of them being lost in the war”, and asks more than once to be checked against the votes.
- The anecdote’s member is unnamed and the effect is reported only by the man who sought it.
- Errors in the edition, not the memoir. The editor’s “Chief events” list gives “1737 Elected to the Assembly”, but the memoir has him clerk from 1736 and elected a burgess only after he left business in 1748; it puts the Braddock supplies at 1756, where the memoir’s own advertisement is dated “LANCASTER, April 26, 1755”. Its “1746 Publishes … Plain Truth” is also a year early by the usual dating (1747), which is from outside the text and was not checked. The transcriber’s notes call the Harvard Classics a G. P. Putnam & Sons edition, where the title page says P. F. Collier & Son.
Open questions
- Did the favour work on the member, as the maxim says, or on Franklin, whose request and note were themselves the first civil acts? The memoir cannot separate them, and LIT-1419’s experiment is the place that might.