People like you more than you think: the liking gap explained

You’ve just finished chatting to someone new at a friend’s birthday. On the walk to the bus, the replay starts. You talked too much. That joke about your job didn’t land. Why did you bring up the cat? By the time you sit down, you’ve decided they found you, at best, fine.

Here’s the good news, backed by a neat set of studies: you’re probably wrong. Psychologists call it the liking gap, and once you know about it, the post-chat replay loses a lot of its power.

What is the liking gap?

In 2018, Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark published five studies in Psychological Science built around a simple question: after you talk to someone new, can you tell how much they liked you?

In the lab, they paired up people who had never met, gave them a few minutes to chat, then asked each person privately two things. How much do you like your partner? And how much do you think your partner likes you? People consistently rated their own liking for their partner higher than the liking they thought came back. They also underestimated how much their partner had enjoyed the conversation.

Here’s the clever bit. Across a room full of pairs, it can’t be true that everyone likes their partner more than their partner likes them. The numbers have to balance out. So the gap isn’t telling us that people are unlikeable. It’s telling us that we misread the warmth coming back at us.

Why do we think people like us less than they do?

A big part of the answer is where your attention goes. During a conversation you’re busy monitoring yourself: what you just said, how it sounded, what to say next. Afterwards, those self-critical thoughts dominate the replay. The researchers found evidence that this harsh self-assessment feeds the gap: people tend to judge their own performance more severely than their partner does.

It’s a close cousin of the spotlight effect. In a classic 2000 study, Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Husted Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky had students walk into a room wearing an embarrassing T-shirt. The wearers guessed that about half the room had noticed. In reality, it was closer to a quarter. We’re the main character in our own heads. Other people are mostly busy being the main character in theirs.

Does the liking gap go away once you know someone?

Not quickly. The team followed first-year university students as they got to know the people they shared student housing with, and the gap lasted for several months. It also showed up outside the lab, among members of the public taking part in a personal development workshop, and in conversations of different lengths.

Later studies have stretched it further. In 2021, Adam Mastroianni, Gus Cooney, Erica Boothby and Andrew Reece found a liking gap in groups and teams too, and it was tied to how people felt about working together. The same year, developmental psychologists Wolf, Nafe and Tomasello reported that the gap starts early: children older than five already thought their partners rated them less positively than they rated their partners.

A fair caveat: these are averages. Some conversations genuinely go badly, and most of the studies were run in Western countries. But the direction of the error is remarkably consistent.

What the liking gap costs you

A small misjudgement adds up. If you leave most conversations thinking you were merely tolerated, you hold back. You don’t send the “that was fun, coffee next week?” message. You assume the friendship is one-sided and let it cool. You read a slow reply as rejection when it was just a busy Tuesday.

It sits alongside other well-documented social misjudgements. In a 2014 study, Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked commuters to talk to someone on their train. People expected it to be awkward, yet those who talked reported a more positive commute than those who sat in silence. And in 2022, Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found people underestimate how much others want to go beyond small talk. Put together, the pattern is clear: we tend to expect less from other people than they’re ready to give.

How to close the liking gap: try this

1. Adjust your estimate upwards. After a conversation, make your honest guess about how much they liked you. Then nudge it up. On the research, that’s closer to the truth.
2. Point your attention outwards. Ask questions you actually want answered. Curiosity leaves less room for the inner commentator.
3. Look at the evidence, not the replay. Did they ask follow-up questions? Laugh? Stay longer than they needed to? Those count for more than the moment you stumbled over a word.
4. Send the follow-up within a day. Keep it light and specific: “Loved hearing about your allotment. Same time next week?” The worst case is a polite no.
5. Give it repetition. The gap fades slowly, so one chat isn’t a verdict. Meet the same person a few times before you decide how they feel about you.

Where Everconnected fits

If you’d like to try this with someone new, Everconnected matches you with people who share your values and interests, for one-to-one conversations by voice. It’s free to join: create an account at app.everconnected.com, or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Boothby, E. J., Cooney, G., Sandstrom, G. M., & Clark, M. S. (2018). The liking gap in conversations: Do people like us more than we think? Psychological Science, 29(11), 1742-1756. doi.org/10.1177/0956797618783714
2. Mastroianni, A. M., Cooney, G., Boothby, E. J., & Reece, A. G. (2021). The liking gap in groups and teams. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 162, 109-122. doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.10.013
3. Wolf, W., Nafe, A., & Tomasello, M. (2021). The development of the liking gap: Children older than 5 years think that partners evaluate them less positively than they evaluate their partners. Psychological Science, 32(5), 789-798. doi.org/10.1177/0956797620980754
4. Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211-222. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211
5. Epley, N., & Schroeder, J. (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5), 1980-1999. doi.org/10.1037/a0037323
6. Kardas, M., Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2022). Overly shallow?: Miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(3), 367-398. doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000281