100 Things: Every Designer Needs to Know About People

81. The More Difficult Something is to Achieve, the More People Like It

You’ve heard about fraternities that have difficult initiation rituals to get in. The idea is that if an organization is hard to get into, then the people in it like it even more than if entry was not so difficult.

The first research on this initiation effect was done by Elliot Aronson at Stanford University in 1959. Aronson set up three initiation scenarios (severe, medium, and mild, although the severe was not really that severe) and randomly assigned people to the conditions. He did indeed find that the more difficult the initiation, the more people liked the group.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Leon Festinger (1956) was the social psychologist who developed the idea of ...