Way before the internet, people put a great deal of effort into getting “likes”. You could even say that one’s ability to generate likes is a primary human concern. Babies are useless, so it’s very important that people like them. If nobody likes them, they may die. Hence they inadvertently do loads of stuff to get on the right side of people. They smile, cling to fingers, copy sounds and gestures, and gaze endearingly into people’s eyes. At first they don’t “know” what they’re doing, but they pretty soon get the hang of doing it all on purpose, and in relation to other people who, one hopes, like them all the more for it. Gradually they learn to speak, and finally to write thank you letters.

Human development, or socialisation, is basically a process of cultivating likability. So likability is far from a crappy, superficial concern: it’s a matter of life and death.

It’s hardly surprising that many of us are left with doubts about exactly how well we’ve done. Especially as, after the baby stage, there’s the rather lengthy, “Don’t do this, don’t do that,” stage, followed by the, “If you don’t like my rules, earn your own money,” stage. You may come out the other side feeling a bit battered: it can look as though being liked involves a great deal of hard work, ingenuity and self-control. Thankfully, there are all sorts of people in the world, some of whom may even seem to like you better if you’re disobedient, selfish and frustrating. This is where it all gets confusing – if it’s not just about being “nice”, then what exactly is it?

In 1936, Dale Carnegie unleashed his bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People. That it’s still in print is perhaps evidence of the fact that many of us would like to understand better how to do just that. It may also suggest that the book does indeed have something useful to say on the subject. Its basic drift is that you have to feed other people’s narcissism. Don’t try to dazzle them with your own excellence. You should show as genuine an interest in them as possible: listen to them, encourage them, value them and, above all, use their name a lot. Consciously, they will think that you think they are marvellous. Unconsciously, they will register that you are already so comfortable in yourself that you need only concern yourself with other people’s comfort. In other words, you are the lord who has everything and can therefore afford to be generous. Bingo, charisma is yours!

While the book has a reputation for encouraging slimy over-familiarity masquerading as confidence, it’s also full of sweet-sounding ideas about finding the good in other people. In a sense, its big idea is to combine the characteristics of the old-school patriarch with his emotionally intelligent wife. To use the terminology of the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, you have to be like a white middle-class male boss who knows how to do “interpretive labour” (AKA get inside the other person’s head) like an immigrant or a woman. You have to work out what the other person wants, and then somehow make your own ends compatible with theirs. While this may sound Machiavellian, a baby can do it. Literally. You’re bound to be doing tons of it already.

The reflexive, unwitting dimension of generating likability is perhaps most starkly dramatised in so-called “trauma-bonding”, or Stockholm syndrome as it used to be known (until people pointed out that it hardly deserved to be called a syndrome given that it’s actually a healthy survival mechanism). When a person is being held hostage, their life may suddenly depend on endearing themselves to their captor. They almost certainly won’t be able to do this by being falsely friendly. They won’t necessarily have time to find out what books or records their captor likes, and to pretend to like them too. They certainly wouldn’t be wise to insert their captor’s name into every other sentence. (“The average person is more interested in their own name than in all the other names in the world put together.” Don’t treat your kidnapper like an average person!)

‘The mysterious subtleties of pleasing other people are too many and too enigmatic to decode.’ Photograph: AzmanL/Getty Images

Like a newborn baby, the hostage will have to cut to the basics, bypassing all the annoying, sophisticated tricks people misguidedly rely on to form bonds. They will have to bare their soul quickly, elegantly and unthreateningly, while looking into the soul of their jailer – with the guilelessness of a baby – and appearing to genuinely like what they see. The fact that this often develops into bona fide two-way respect and affection perhaps reveals something disturbing about the power dynamics of liking and being liked. Or maybe it shows that humans aren’t really as bad as all that.

The tragedy of adult life is that we’re left with all the weird, desperate traces of our early quest for likability

It may at least go some way towards explaining why abusive relationships can be so compelling and difficult to escape from: when the threat is real, the liking, or loving, has to be even more real if one is to get out in one piece. Regular relationships can then feel a bit academic by comparison. (Please don’t kidnap someone if you’re feeling lonely though. It’s far from a foolproof plan.)

The tedious tragedy of adult life is that we’re left with all the weird, desperate traces of our early quest for likability. The infantile layers get overlaid with more tricky stuff. We end up with what’s known as a personality. Perhaps quietness was valued in our family. Or self-reliance. Or maybe we joked all the time to get smiles out of our depressive mothers. We became specialists at surviving our own childhoods. But, like many experts, we find that our skills fall short of what’s needed in the wider world. Not that they were exactly foolproof at home either.

The mysterious subtleties of pleasing other people are too many and too enigmatic to decode. Everyone’s as wacko as we are. The whole project can feel pathetically inauthentic. We never know whether people really like us or whether they’re just biding time to avoid being lonely. We may feel we have too little to offer, materially, intellectually or sentimentally. Or that we’re too boisterous, excessively loving or enviably wealthy. We may sometimes find it all so frustrating that we revert to being horrible because at least that feels real. Our families equipped us with all the wrong techniques.

If we’re at all decent, we’re doomed to read other people constantly, trying to work out what they want. But it’s impossible to pitch ourselves just right in relation to it. On the bright side, if you’re concerned enough about people liking you to be reading this, at least you’re probably not a sociopath. I like you!