By Fantasy readers know the shape instinctively. Two characters who wanted each other dead a hundred pages ago are now the emotional core of the book.
Nobody questions why this works so reliably. I want to actually answer that question, because the found family mechanism is more specific and more counterintuitive than “conflict creates drama.”
The Real Psychology Behind It
Franklin’s Own Account
Benjamin Franklin recorded a specific technique in his autobiography for dealing with a hostile fellow legislator in the Pennsylvania Assembly. Rather than trying to win the man over with kindness, Franklin asked to borrow a rare book from his library.
He returned it with a note of thanks. At their next meeting, the rival spoke to him for the first time, with genuine civility, and Franklin wrote that they remained friends until the man’s death.
Franklin’s own explanation, quoting what he called an old maxim, was that someone who has already done you a kindness will be readier to do you another than someone you’ve done a favor for yourself.
Jecker and Landy Tested It Properly
Psychologists Jon Jecker and David Landy ran the actual experiment in 1969, published in Human Relations. Seventy-four participants competed in a paid academic contest, then were split into three groups afterward.
One group was approached directly by the lead researcher, who asked them personally to return their winnings, claiming he’d used his own money and was running short.
A second group got the same request through a secretary, framed as coming from the department rather than a specific person. A third group wasn’t asked to return anything.
All three were then asked how much they liked the researcher. The group asked directly, who’d done him a personal favor, liked him a lot more than the group who’d never interacted with him further at all. The intermediary request actually decreased liking. The direct, personal ask increased it.
What’s Happening
Cognitive dissonance theory explains the mechanism. When you help someone you don’t especially like, your brain notices the contradiction between the action and the attitude.
Rather than sitting with that contradiction, most people resolve it by adjusting the attitude to match the action. I helped this person, so I must not dislike them as much as I thought.
This is the exact structure enemies to found family runs on. Force two hostile characters into genuine mutual aid: protecting each other in battle, sharing scarce resources, covering for each other’s mistakes. You’ve created the precise psychological condition Jecker and Landy documented.
The liking isn’t a coincidental side effect of proximity. It’s the brain’s own resolution to an uncomfortable contradiction the plot manufactured on purpose.
Why This Beats Starting as Strangers
No Dissonance to Resolve
A found family that begins as strangers has to build trust from a completely neutral baseline. There’s no contradiction for anyone’s brain to resolve, no existing attitude the new cooperation has to overwrite. The bonding, narratively, has less internal pressure behind it.
A found family that begins as enemies starts every act of cooperation already fighting against an established attitude. Each favor, each moment of protection, carries the psychological weight of contradicting something the character, and the reader, already believed about this relationship.
That contradiction is where the emotional charge actually comes from.
A Renewable Source of Tension
Practically, this gives an author something structurally valuable. Trust built between strangers can only be established once. Trust built between former enemies can be doubted, questioned, and re-earned repeatedly, because the reader retains genuine uncertainty about whether the old hostility might resurface.
That uncertainty is a resource an author can spend across an entire book or series, which is exactly why this structure recurs so consistently across long fantasy works specifically.
Gimli and Legolas Run This Almost Exactly
The Enmity Was Real Before They Met
Tolkien establishes deep historical hostility between dwarves and elves well before the Fellowship forms, most directly through Thranduil’s imprisonment of Thorin’s company in The Hobbit.
Gimli and Legolas begin their journey together carrying that inherited suspicion rather than personal animosity specifically, which makes the shift that follows even more interesting.
The Favor That Changes Everything
Their actual bond forms through exactly the mechanism Jecker and Landy documented: sustained mutual aid under pressure. At Helm’s Deep, they turn their inherited rivalry into an explicit competition, keeping a running count of orc kills, which converts hostility into cooperative energy rather than actual conflict.
By the trilogy’s end, Legolas asks to visit Fangorn Forest with Gimli, and Gimli asks to see the Glittering Caves of Aglarond with Legolas, each specifically wanting to share the thing that matters most to the other.
That’s not proximity producing tolerance. That’s genuine, mutual attitude change, exactly the direction cognitive dissonance predicts once the cooperation had been sustained long enough.
Kaladin and Bridge Four Show the Mechanism From the Other Direction
Distrust Ran Both Ways
Brandon Sanderson’s Kaladin joins Bridge Four in The Way of Kings carrying a reputation that precedes him, a man whose previous bridge crews died under his watch, and the crew’s initial wariness toward him is entirely reasonable given what they’ve heard.
Kaladin, in turn, has real reason to expect nothing but more death from another disposable crew. Neither side starts from goodwill. Both start from a rational, evidence-based expectation of loss.
Small Favors Compound
What actually shifts the relationship is a sequence of small, costly interventions: Kaladin using his own limited resources to keep the crew alive, teaching them tactics that measurably improve their survival odds, refusing to treat them as disposable the way every previous authority figure had.
Each individual act is modest. The cumulative effect, exactly as the Ben Franklin mechanism predicts, is a crew that comes to genuinely value someone they had every rational reason to keep at arm’s length, precisely because they’d already invested real effort and trust in him before the friendship had any other explanation.
Jaime and Brienne Test the Limits of the Trope Honestly
She Had Every Reason to Hate Him
Brienne of Tarth’s initial view of Jaime Lannister in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is built on his public reputation: oathbreaker, kingslayer, a man whose family’s actions she has direct personal reason to resent. Their journey together begins with her as his captor and, functionally, his enemy.
The Bond Forms Through Real Cost, Not Just Time
What changes this isn’t simply extended proximity. It’s specific, costly action: Jaime’s account of why he actually killed the Mad King reframing an assumed villainy into something closer to necessary sacrifice, and later, real physical risk each takes to protect the other.
This reveal specifically forces the reader to recognize that they’d convicted Jaime using incomplete evidence. That reader-level dissonance runs in parallel with Brienne’s own, both resolving a contradiction between an established hostile attitude and new information that doesn’t fit it.
Counterargument
I don’t want to overstate this mechanism’s reach. Plenty of excellent found family stories build their bonds from neutral or immediately warm starting points, with no enmity to resolve at all, and they work perfectly well.
Sanderson’s own Stormlight Archive gives Bridge Four members who join later a much gentler entry than Kaladin’s own arrival, and those relationships still land with real weight. Not every found family needs a hostility to overcome to earn its emotional payoff.
Where I think the enemies to family structure genuinely earns its specific reputation is in producing the most memorable, most frequently cited version of this bond, and the psychological mechanism explains why. A contradiction resolved feels more significant, and is more memorable afterward, than an expectation simply confirmed.
Warmth that was always warmth doesn’t ask anything of the reader’s own attitude. Hostility that becomes loyalty forces a real revision, and revised beliefs tend to stick harder than beliefs that were never challenged in the first place.
What This Means If You’re Writing One
The Favor Has to Cost Something
Jecker and Landy’s study specifically found that a direct, personal request mattered more than an impersonal one delivered through an intermediary. The fictional equivalent is specificity. A vague, general act of teamwork does less work than one character making a costly, particular choice that directly benefits someone they’re supposed to hate.
Let the Contradiction Sit Before Resolving It
The psychological mechanism requires real discomfort first. If a story rushes past the hostility too quickly, there’s no real dissonance for the eventual bond to resolve, and the shift reads as convenient rather than earned. Give the contradiction room to actually feel uncomfortable before the story lets it resolve.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Ben Franklin effect work the same way in reverse, if someone does you a favor rather than the other way around?
Related research on this question, including work by Yu Niiya, suggests the direction of the favor matters. Being asked to help someone tends to increase your own liking for them more reliably than simply receiving help does, which is the specific direction fiction most often uses for this trope.
Is there a point where forced cooperation in fiction reads as unrealistic rather than earning the eventual bond?
Yes, generally when the story compresses the timeline too aggressively or skips showing the actual costly favor that would trigger real dissonance, leaving the friendship feeling asserted by the plot rather than produced by anything the characters actually did for each other.
Did Benjamin Franklin’s own account ever get disputed by historians?
Some historians have questioned specific details of Franklin’s autobiographical anecdotes generally, since he wrote them decades after the events they describe, though the broader psychological effect has been independently confirmed through controlled experimentation regardless of the anecdote’s precise accuracy.
Are there real world examples of the enemies to allies pattern outside psychology experiments and fiction?
Wartime accounts of opposing soldiers forming unlikely bonds through shared hardship or mutual aid are frequently documented, and some negotiation and mediation training deliberately uses small, low-stakes favor requests specifically to reduce hostility between conflicting parties.
Does this mechanism apply to romantic relationships as well as platonic found family bonds?
The same cognitive dissonance principle underlies enemies to lovers as a romance structure, which is likely why both tropes recur so persistently across genre fiction. The psychological mechanism doesn’t distinguish between romantic and platonic attachment, only between hostile and cooperative behavior.
Final Thoughts
Two characters forced into genuine mutual reliance will like each other more afterward, reliably enough that a 1969 psychology experiment could document it under controlled conditions.
Tolkien didn’t need the citation to know it worked. He just needed Gimli and Legolas keeping score at Helm’s Deep, and readers have trusted that friendship completely ever since.
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- Chosen One vs Reluctant Hero: What Sets Them Apart
- 7 Dark Fantasy Tropes That Make The Genre Work
- Why Fated Mates Are So Hard to Put Down
- Fate vs Free Will: Dark Fantasy’s Favorite Argument
- 7 Character Archetypes Every Dark Fantasy Needs
Further Reading
- Liking a Person as a Function of Doing Him a Favour – Jon Jecker, David Landy, 1969
- A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
- Does a Favor Request Increase Liking Toward the Requester? – Yu Niiya
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin – Benjamin Franklin
- The Fellowship of the Ring – J. R. R. Tolkien
- The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Return of the King – John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
- The Way of Kings – Brandon Sanderson
- A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book Three) | George R.R. Martin
Written by Batin Khan, a curious free spirit who loves reading and exploring the worlds of fantasy, mythology, and ancient stories. Through this blog, Batin hopes to share that sense of wonder with readers while building an exciting future along the way.