The Liking Gap: After a Conversation, People Like You More Than You Think

By Noam Shemla · The Studies

TL;DR After talking with someone new, people consistently underestimate how much the other person liked them and enjoyed the conversation. Boothby and colleagues called it the liking gap and found it in five studies: strangers in the lab, conversations lasting from 2 to 45 minutes, members of the public at workshops, and first-year students getting to know their suitemates over a whole academic year. The other person’s liking was visible to observers; people simply did not see it, because they were busy with their own critical thoughts about how they had come across.

  • Paper: 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.
  • Study 1a: 36 adults from the community, paired with a same-sex stranger for a five-minute conversation using ice-breaker questions.
  • Study 1b: Two coders, blind to the hypothesis, watched 15 of those videos and rated how much each person liked the other.
  • Study 2: 84 students and recent graduates, five minutes of free conversation, plus the three moments each thought shaped the impressions.
  • Study 3: 102 people who talked for as long as they liked, anywhere from 2 to 45 minutes.
  • Study 4: 100 members of the public at “How to Talk to Strangers” workshops in the UK, before and after a five-minute introduction.
  • Study 5: 102 first-year students rating their suitemates five times across an academic year.

Everyone knows the feeling of walking away from a first conversation and replaying it: did I talk too much, was I boring, did that joke land? Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark asked whether that nagging doubt is accurate. Their answer, across five studies, is that it is not.1

How you measure a mistake about someone else's mind

The design is simple. Two strangers talk. Then, separately, each answers two sets of questions: how much they liked the other person, and how much they think the other person liked them.

The logic that turns this into evidence of an error is the elegant part. In a pair, the liking I report giving is exactly the liking my partner receives, and the reverse. So averaged across everyone, the liking people give must equal the liking people receive. If people's estimates of the liking they received are lower on average, those estimates are wrong on average: people are underestimating how much they were liked.

Five studies, one gap

In the first study, people liked their partner 5.82 out of 7 on average, and thought their partner liked them 5.17. That difference, which cannot be real, is the liking gap. It appeared in every study that followed.

The signals were there; people missed them

Why would people misjudge this? One possibility is that people hide their liking, so there is nothing to read. The other is that the liking is on display and goes unnoticed.

To separate the two, the authors had two coders who did not know the hypothesis watch the videotaped conversations and rate how much each person liked the other. If people hide their liking, observers should not be able to see it either.

The authors call this the neglected-signal account, as opposed to a no-signal account. And the second study showed what people were attending to instead. Asked to name the three moments that shaped each impression, people rated the moments they thought shaped their partner's view of them as more negative than the moments that shaped their own view of the partner. That difference in the tone of their thoughts accounted for part of the gap (indirect effect b = −0.14, 95% CI [−0.22, −0.07]).

In short: during a conversation you have a running commentary on your own performance, and the other person does not. They got the point, laughed at the joke, and thought it was fine. You remember the story you could have told better.

Who has the biggest gap

Shyness made it worse. In the first study, the shyest third of participants showed a large gap, the middle third a smaller one, and the least shy third none that could be distinguished from zero.

Rejection sensitivity, self-esteem and narcissism did not change the size of the gap.

Longer conversations do not fix it

A natural guess is that the gap is a first-minute effect that disappears once people really talk. In the third study, people could talk for as long as they wanted, up to 45 minutes. Longer conversations produced more liking and more enjoyment all round, but the gap between what people felt and what they thought their partner felt was about the same whether the conversation was short, medium or long.

Among suitemates the gap lasted for months: it was significant in September, October, December and February, and disappeared only by May, when the students were deciding who to live with the next year. Offering a $100 prize for accurate estimates made no difference, which suggests people really believed their low estimates.

Has it held up?

The liking gap has since turned up in new settings. The same group later found it in small groups and in engineering project teams, and linked it to how well teams of working adults were able to work together.2 A study of 241 children found it emerging at about the age of five, when children begin to care about how others see them, and growing with age.3

What this study cannot tell you

  • Most participants were students, though the workshop study used members of the public in the UK.
  • Liking is self-reported on both sides. The design depends on people reporting their own liking honestly, which the observers' ratings and the ignored cash incentive both support.
  • The gap is an average. Some people overestimate how much they are liked; the finding is that, on average, people err on the pessimistic side.
  • This summary is based on the authors' accepted manuscript, whose numbers may differ slightly from the published version's.

What a speaker can take from it

This is the study to remember after a networking event, a first meeting or a talk that felt flat from the inside. The critic in your head is reviewing a performance the audience did not see. They heard the point, not the sentence you would rephrase.

It also changes what to do next. If you are liked more than you know, the cost of following up is lower than it feels. Send the message, suggest the coffee, ask the question. The other person probably enjoyed it more than you think.

This article summarises a published paper from the authors’ accepted manuscript. Every mean, difference, coefficient and interval above is the authors’ own, from the results of Studies 1a to 5. The equation restates the paper’s reasoning; it is not a formula from the paper.

Measured

  • Self-reported liking of a partner and estimated liking from the partner, on the same scales
  • Observers’ ratings of liking from videotapes (Study 1b)
  • The tone of the moments people said shaped each impression (Study 2)

Inferred, not measured

  • That the gap is an error: this follows from the symmetry of the pairs, not from a direct measure of anyone’s mind
  • Negative self-focused thoughts as a cause: supported by a mediation analysis, which is correlational

References

  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. https://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. https://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. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620980754