Do People Like You More Than You Think? Understanding the Liking Gap

Imagine meeting someone at a friend's exhibition. You talk about the pictures, then about the peculiar confidence of people who arrange gallery lighting. They laugh. You find them easy company. Outside, waiting for the bus, you remember that you also spent an unexplained minute describing your broken washing machine.

Of everything that happened, this is what gets to represent you.

If you often leave a conversation thinking people didn't like you, a 2018 study offers a useful complication: people sometimes give themselves a worse review than their conversation partners do. Researchers called the difference the “liking gap.” It doesn't mean every stranger secretly adores you. It means that the impression you carry home can be more pessimistic than the other person's own account.

The interesting part is how the researchers checked. They had access to something our solitary bus-stop investigations generally lack: both sides of the conversation.

AI-generated illustration of an imagined scene, not the research or its participants.

Two people, two rather different reviews

Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark began with a modest arrangement. Two people who hadn't met sat beside each other at a table and talked for about five minutes. They were given icebreaker questions about subjects such as where they came from and their hobbies. The pairs were same-sex; participants were recruited through flyers on and near Yale's campus.

Afterwards, they went to separate rooms. Each rated how much they liked their partner, wanted to know them better, would like another interaction and could imagine becoming friends. They also estimated how their partner would rate them on the corresponding questions.

This is a pleasantly direct way to investigate a very indirect habit. Instead of asking someone to explain a stranger's smile, ask the stranger.

The analysis included 34 people, after one pair turned out to be close friends and was excluded. Combining the four questions on a seven-point scale, the researchers found a statistically significant gap. The model-estimated average was 5.82 for how much people said they liked their partner, but 5.17 for how much they thought their partner liked them. These were people's own reports of liking, not an independent measurement of affection.

Still, the mismatch is revealing. Across the pairs, people rated their partners more warmly than they believed their partners rated them. Both people could walk away feeling that they liked the other person more than the other person liked them. The arithmetic cannot support that impression for everyone at once.

Notice, too, that 5.17 is hardly a verdict of total rejection. The gap can exist inside an encounter that both people regard fairly positively. You don't have to think you were a catastrophe to underestimate how welcome you were.

Could an outsider see any signs of liking?

Perhaps people simply hide their liking. Conversation has plenty of polite noises that could mean anything, including a sincere wish to reach the coat rack.

To check, two trained research assistants watched recordings of those same conversations: 15 usable videos in all. They didn't know the researchers' hypothesis. Their task was to judge how much each speaker seemed to like the other person.

When the observers rated a speaker as liking their partner more, that speaker also tended to report more liking on the questionnaire. The link was statistically significant. So liking wasn't entirely invisible: the videos contained clues that lined up with what people said they felt.

That is a narrower finding than “outsiders can read your date's mind.” It doesn't establish that observers are better judges than the people involved. But it does challenge the idea that nobody gives anything away. Our speaker at the bus stop has been reviewing the washing-machine story. The conversation contained more than that.

AI-generated illustration of an imagined scene, not the research or its participants.

Why your own awkward sentence gets so much airtime

A further study offers a clue about what gets our attention. After five-minute conversations, 84 Yale students and recent graduates listed three moments that shaped their view of their partner, and three they thought shaped their partner's view of them. They then rated those moments as positive or negative.

The moments behind “what I think of you” were warmer than those behind “what I imagine you think of me.” That difference was associated with the liking gap. It suggests a possible role for self-critical thoughts, without proving they caused the mismatch: the researchers asked people about their thoughts, rather than assigning them different inner monologues.

Our imaginary washing-machine speaker illustrates the distinction. They know exactly when their story became less promising than intended. Their listener wasn't comparing the conversation with an improved version rehearsed on the bus. Perhaps the listener enjoyed it; perhaps not. The speaker's detailed knowledge of their own disappointment cannot settle that question.

The paper concerns impressions in particular research settings, not a universal rule for every friendship, culture or encounter. Nor is a measure of liking and potential friendship a test of romantic attraction. There are people who won't like us, conversations that genuinely go poorly, and signals worth taking seriously.

What these studies disturb is the assumption that our unflattering version is the especially perceptive one. It can feel informed because we have so much material: the pause, the unnecessary detail, the better sentence that arrived six minutes late. Yet all that detail comes from one participant.

The other person was there too. In these studies, their reports were, on average, kinder.

Source

Erica J. Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian M. Sandstrom and Margaret S. Clark (2018). The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think? Psychological Science. Read the accepted manuscript.