A closer look
Performing a favor for someone you actively dislike actually tricks your brain into liking them more, a wildly counterintuitive loophole named the Benjamin Franklin effect. If you lend a pen to a coworker you secretly despise, your mind experiences immediate cognitive dissonance, unable to reconcile why you would help an enemy. To resolve this internal conflict, your brain simply rewrites your feelings, deciding that you must actually like the person since you just did something nice for them. It means the best way to get someone to tolerate you is not by doing nice things for them, but by forcing them to do incredibly minor, annoying favors for you until their brain gets deeply confused and artificially generates feelings of friendship
