The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think?

Abstract

Having conversations with new people is an important and rewarding part of social life. Yet conversations can also be intimidating and anxiety provoking, and this makes people wonder and worry about what their conversation partners really think of them. Are people accurate in their estimates? We found that following interactions, people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company, an illusion we call the liking gap. We observed the liking gap as strangers got acquainted in the laboratory, as first-year college students got to know their dorm mates, and as formerly unacquainted members of the general public got to know each other during a personal development workshop. The liking gap persisted in conversations of varying lengths and even lasted for several months, as college dorm mates developed new relationships. Our studies suggest that after people have conversations, they are liked more than they know.

<p>Negative Deviation Effect in Interpersonal Communication: Why People Underestimate the Positivity of Impression They Left on Others</p>

“…At the same time, it proved that the negative deviation effect was not just caused by people's ownnegative thoughts of conversational performance, because the effect still existed in people who were not self-critique. Therefore, it is not entirely sufficient for Boothby (2018) to conclude that the more people thought negatively in the communication, the bigger the liking gap existed between them. While we found that the bigger or smaller gap still exists when people had no negative thoughts.…”

“…Hence, why does the negative deviation effect exist? Is it appropriate to attribute this effect to the hypothesis that people are too focused on their negative thoughts of themselves to notice the signals of their mutual liking, as described in research previously 48 ? If there are no negative thoughts in the interpersonal communication, will there still be a negative deviation effect?…”

“…As described in detail previously, 48 each conversation involved two participants who did not know each other. They were arranged to start a conversation face to face for 5 min.…”

“…42 The research on impression formation mainly explored the formation and change of people's impression of others for a long time. Most notably, recent work 48 has shown that people estimate the impression they left on others after initial communication, exploring impression formation in a new way. The experimenters asked the target participants to communicate with other participants who do not know each other and then asked both of them to rate how much they liked each other and estimated how much they were liked.…”

Kaleidoscope

“…Boothby et al propose this is a universal illusion, which they label the 'liking gap'. 7 They observed new acquaintances among first-year college students, members of the public, and a laboratory team, and the findings were consistent: people systematically underestimate how much others like them and how much their company was actually enjoyed. It persisted across conversations of varying length, and could last months.…”