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For those who never came across it, the ‘Ben Franklin effect’ is a social advice that follows: ‘If someone doesn’t like you, and you ask them for a small favour, something easy for them to do, they will start liking you better afterwards.’ So how does this work?

When you’re asking for a favour, you’re calculating the cost of the action, while the other person is waging the cost of refusal. We have socially evolved to help each other out, to the point where refusing a small and easy favour is considered rude and bad social behaviour. The act itself of being asked for a favour brings a person into a position of considered valuable, helpful, needed. So by asking someone to do you a favour, you’ve already given them the affirmation that you find them a necessary and useful part of your social circle; refusing to do a favour means refusing the affirmation as well. Even people who don’t like you (as long as they don’t outwardly hate you), are still likely to say yes, for the sake of their social status.

When you’re doing a favour to someone you don’t like, you’re likely to experience discomfort because your actions aren’t aligned with your beliefs, this is called 'cognitive dissonance’. Why are you doing a favour to someone you don’t like? You’re likely to try to justify it in some way, and you’ve already received the affirmation that they don’t hate you, but find you valuable, even if it’s in a small way – so you start liking them okay.

It was also proven that after doing someone a small favour, you’re likely to do a bigger one – you like your actions to be consistent and the feeling of being considered capable, dependable and valuable is better to take than to risk being considered rude and asocial.

Because some of us have been neglected and punished for asking for help. Because we were taught to be self-reliant, to do everything ourselves, that we have to be compentent on our own, and if we ask for help we’ll be considered a burden and told we’re stupid for even thinking we deserve any help. We had the social inclination to ask for help, attention, to try and figure things out while seeing other people as someone we can count on for assistance as little children, and then this was shut down in the most brutal way possible. If our own parents and caretakes didn’t find us worthy of help, how could we ask other people for favours? How could we even learn that this is something we’re allowed to do? We got rubbed in out faces about how much we 'need’ and 'want’ if we even ask for basic necessities!

Our instincts to ask for favours just as much as we do them has been destroyed. We end up feeling mortified, incompentent, weak and alone if we need help. Healthy people’s instincts to reach out as soon as they need a tiny favour – as well as making themselves likeable and good at social functions, has been denied and sabotaged in us.

This makes the Ben-Franklin effect work on us stronger than on others. We crave the affirmation that we’re needed and considered valuable so strongly, we’re likely to do endless favours, even if there’s next to no gratitude, even if we realize we’re being exploited. It wil become a magic circle where we feel helpless and rude to refuse, feeling used if we accept, secretly harboring feeling of being useful and dependable, as our parents trained us to think it’s our only acceptable trait.

In our strive to protect ourselves from being rejected, triggered, told we’re asking for too much or humiliated like we were in the past, we don’t ask for favours, and we don’t offer our peers a chance to be helpful to us; we’re likely to want to help them, and not allow ourselves to be helped. Some of our peers might feel dejected that we don’t find them needed, competent or valuable to us, just because we never count on them for anything. We don’t make others feel needed, because we don’t know how to. We unconsciously set ourselves up to only be the one who does the favours; others, in return, will accept it’s all they can ever get from us, and get used to exploiting it, without feeling a lot of affection for us in the process.

If we were raised in a healthy environment, asking for small favours would come natural; we wouldn’t even think twice before asking to borrow something small, asking to be heard, asking for help to understand, to fit in, to feel good. It would come instinctively. It seems that if we want to learn to socialize in a more natural, beneficial and fulfilling way, we’ll have to teach ourselves to ask for favours. It will not make us a burden, it will not make us needy, or weak. It will let others see that we’re human and we see them and need them, and they will like us more for it.

So because parkour is such a ridiculously male dominated sport, the "correct technique" for a lot of these movements that you're taught when you become an instructor plays to a male body's strengths: upper body strength, higher center of gravity, etc.

She demolishes this course by moving in ways that make sense for her body. She doesn't muscle her way up to her over a wall, she just throws a leg up over the wall. She doesn't use upper body strength to do the salmon ladder, she uses her hips!!! And it's fucking incredible.

So many girls and young women walk away from parkour because every movement caters to the strengths of men, because doing what makes sense for their bodies is seen as "bad technique" to be trained away.

marcus nispel’s soho loft

by ocean vuong

it surprises me, how a gesture so small can feel so very big. how sometimes you don’t realize the nervousness or sadness you were holding deep inside until the touch of someone you love lets it all out of you, like your entire body is exhaling