People Probably Like You More Than You Think

Initial conversations can have an outsized impact on how relationships develop over time. Naturally, people often dwell on the impressions they might have made the minute they finish speaking with someone for the first time: “Did they like me or were they just being polite?” “Was my pitch funny or offensive?” “Are they deep in thought or deeply bored?”

In our research in psychology, we wondered whether these worries might loom too large. Do people understand the impressions they make on others or do their anxieties lead them to assume the worst? Across nearly 10 years of research and tens of thousands of observations, we’ve come to this answer: people underestimate how much others like them, and this bias has important implications for how people work together.

The “Liking Gap”

In our studies, participants in the U.S. and the UK talked with someone they had never met before, such as a stranger in the lab, a new roommate, or a potential future colleague at a networking event. Afterward, we asked people how much they liked their conversation partner and how much they believed that their conversation partner liked them. In some cases we defined “like” as “interest in getting to know this person more” or “could see us becoming “friends” and in some cases, we didn’t define it and left it to that person’s judgment. This allowed us to compare how much people believed they were liked to how much they were actually liked.

Time and time again, we found that people left their conversations with negatively biased feelings about the impression they made (“I’m pretty sure that I liked them more than they liked me.”). That is, people systematically underestimate how much their conversation partners like them and enjoy their company — an illusion we call the “liking gap.”

The liking gap — or people’s overly pessimistic beliefs about the impression they made — may seem like something that would occur only in initial interactions, but its effects extend far beyond a first impression. Surprisingly, the liking gap can linger and permeate a variety of relationships, including interactions with coworkers, persisting long after the initial conversations have taken place. For example, in one of our studies, teammates who had worked together for six months still showed a liking gap. Having a larger liking gap was associated with being less willing to ask colleagues for help, less willing to provide colleagues with open and honest feedback, and less willing to work on another project together.

Decades of research have shown that strong relationships at work reduce turnover, boost creativity, and increase job satisfaction. Critically, these outcomes depend not only on the reality of what other people think of us, but just as much on what we believe others think of us. Our research shows that people’s beliefs can be overly negative, which can affect their ability to thrive at work.

Focusing on the Negatives (About Ourselves)

Why don’t people realize just how positively others actually view them? We think that people’s self-critical thoughts are a key culprit.

We asked people, after their initial conversations with someone else, to write down their most salient thoughts and the thoughts they believed their conversation partner had. As we suspected, people’s thoughts about themselves were much more negative than were their thoughts about their conversation partner. People ruminated on the things they believed they did poorly during their conversations and this clouded their ability to see just how much the other person actually liked them. While focusing on self-critical thoughts may have benefits — for example, understanding  your mistakes and learning from them can help you do better next time — it also leads people to underestimate someone else’s impression of them.

It turns out these self-critical thoughts don’t just crop up after the fact, they can even appear as we are anticipating a conversation. Specifically, when people expect to talk to someone who is different from them in some way — a different race, age, sociocultural background, or even from a different division within one’s company — our research shows that their expectations skew pessimistic, causing people to often avoid talking to those who are different from them. This means that the liking gap, which is also influenced by a person’s own conscious or unconscious biases, may have the unfortunate effect of acting as a barrier to building more diverse networks and inclusive workplaces.

Shift Your Attention

What can you do to better align your beliefs with reality? There’s no simple answer, but when it comes to having conversations with others — whether small talk or something more formal — one place to start is shifting your focus of attention.

Try to zoom in on your conversation partner, be genuinely curious about them, ask them more questions, and really listen to their answers. The more you’re zeroed in on the other person, and the less you’re focused on yourself, the better your conversation will be and the less your mind will turn to all the things you think you didn’t do well.

Of course, this is easier said than done. People’s attention naturally drifts back to themselves and what they could fix. Our research shows, for example, that people do not end conversations at ideal moments and tell stories that contain too much novel information to be fully understood by their partners. But ultimately, these conversational faux pas don’t amount to the negative assessments that people fear. Your conversation partners are often more concerned with themselves during conversations, meaning they probably don’t even notice the mistakes you ruminate about. Indeed, in our studies, the things that people say they did wrong are rarely mentioned by the other person.

Here are a couple of examples from our research:

Participant 1: “She seems like a really cool person. She strikes me as a friendly, gregarious, and high-achieving person.”

What Participant 2 believed Participant 1 thought of her: “I probably seemed overeager. I hope I came off as nice.”

Another example:

Participant 1: “She seemed really nice. She was quiet, but pleasant to talk to.”

What Participant 2 believed Participant 1 thought of her: “I am not as involved in my community, and I am a less social person.”

It makes sense that people are vigilant to potential sources of embarrassment, awkwardness, or judgment. But these fears are often illusory, or at least exaggerated. A good way to overcome them is to get out there and strike up a conversation with someone new. Call that person you have been meaning to, say hello to the colleague you have been avoiding, or register for that networking event and try shifting your attention to your conversation partner instead of yourself. And remember, people will probably like you more than you think­.