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The conversation with your new colleague actually went well. On the way home, though, it occurs to you that you interrupted her twice, and in hindsight her laugh at your remark seems more polite than genuine. A team of researchers studied exactly this moment. After a getting-to-know-you conversation, they asked both people the same questions: How much did you like the other person, and how much do you think they liked you? The results showed a clear pattern. On average, people liked their conversation partner more than they believed they themselves were liked. The other person also often underestimated how well they had come across. So two people could share the same conversation and afterward both judge too harshly how they had come across to each other.
The psychologist Erica Boothby published this finding in 2018 together with Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom, and Margaret Clark and gave it a name: the liking gap, the gap between how much we are liked and how much we assume we are.
What gets lost in conversation
Some of the conversations were filmed. Trained observers were able to judge fairly well from the recordings how much the participants liked each other. The participants themselves, by contrast, underestimated how positively they had come across. While we talk, a considerable part of our attention goes to our own effect on the other person, to the next sentence we’re putting together and to the last one we’re quietly checking again. Less is left over for the other person’s reactions than we think. The more negative thoughts someone had about their own performance after the conversation, the larger the gap, and it was especially pronounced among shy people.
Margaret Clark suspects a form of self-protection behind this. As long as we don’t know for sure that someone likes us, we’d rather not assume it, because a disappointment then hurts less. Especially in new encounters, this self-criticism can be particularly strong.
In the dorm and at the office
The misjudgment fades over time, but slowly. Boothby and her team followed first-year students who shared a suite in a dormitory over an entire academic year. For roughly two thirds of that time, they believed their suitemates liked them less than they actually did. Only toward the end of the year did their estimates and reality line up.
In 2021, Adam Mastroianni, together with Cooney, Boothby, and Andrew Reece, examined whether the pattern also shows up at work. It appeared in a student engineering team that spent weeks working on a shared project, as well as in a survey of nearly 1,900 working adults. The gap was largest between colleagues at the same level; between managers and their teams it was smaller. In the survey, its size was also linked to how well the team worked together. Anyone who asks a colleague for help or disagrees with one needs the sense that the others are fundamentally well-disposed toward them. When that sense is missing, even though it would be justified, a lot goes unsaid.
When we let our guard down
The same strictness toward ourselves shows up as soon as we reveal a weakness. Here, too, the question is how we come across to others, only in a moment when we feel particularly exposed. Anna Bruk conducted seven studies on this at the University of Mannheim together with Sabine Scholl and Herbert Bless. Participants imagined situations in which a person makes themselves vulnerable, such as admitting a mistake or asking for help. Sometimes they were asked to think of themselves, sometimes of another person in the same situation. For themselves, most expected to appear weak and inadequate. In the other person, they rated exactly the same behavior as courageous. The pattern also held in a real situation in which participants actually faced something unpleasant. Bruk called the finding the beautiful mess effect, because our own vulnerability feels like a mess from the inside and, from the outside, looks more like something we value in a person.
The explanation has to do with the distance from which we view a situation. When it’s about us, we’re right in the middle of it and think in details. Bruk illustrated this with a birthday: other people organize a party, while we ourselves send the invitations, do the shopping, and bake the cake. Up close, the risks push to the front, the awkward silence after a confession or the look on the boss’s face after a mistake. We look at others from a greater distance, and from a distance it’s easier to see what such a moment says about a person.
Where the limits are
The effect has its limits. Kerry Roberts Gibson, Dana Harari, and Jennifer Carson Marr showed in 2018 that managers who disclose certain weaknesses to their employees can, under some circumstances, lose influence. Who you confide in, and what you share, matters.
Asking for advice at work, on the other hand, is usually nothing to worry about. Alison Wood Brooks, Francesca Gino, and Maurice Schweitzer found in 2015 that people who ask for advice are seen as more competent. The effect was strongest for difficult tasks and when someone asked the other person directly for their own view.
How the gap can shrink
In research published in 2022, Bruk and her team tested across four studies whether self-compassion can weaken the beautiful mess effect. People who treat themselves with the same kindness they show others did in fact judge their own vulnerability more mildly.
This hasn’t been studied specifically for the liking gap, but it seems plausible, since both effects arise in a similar way. We judge ourselves from up close, noting every hesitation and every clumsy sentence, while others take away an overall impression in which such details barely register. In everyday life, the two effects could reinforce each other. Someone who believes they’re not well liked may shy away from exactly those small moments of openness in which others would get to know them better.
Exercise: The outside view
Give yourself a week and a note on your phone.
After the next conversation that keeps running through your head afterward, write down two concrete signs that the other person enjoyed it, for example a follow-up question or the fact that you talked longer than planned. If nothing comes to mind, that doesn’t mean the conversation went badly. Maybe you were mostly busy assessing your own effect.
If the conversation felt good to you, send the person a short message saying you enjoyed talking with them. Erica Boothby recommends exactly this, because the other person is very likely just as unsure as you are.
If you like, you can also ask yourself a question the next time you’d rather keep an uncertainty or a mistake to yourself: How would I feel if a colleague I respect brought exactly this up openly?
Who are you currently assuming merely tolerates you rather than likes you, and what have you actually observed that supports this assumption?
Sources
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: 10.1177/0956797618783714
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.
Bruk, A., Scholl, S. G. & Bless, H. (2018). Beautiful mess effect: Self–other differences in evaluation of showing vulnerability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(2), 192–205.
Bruk, A., Scholl, S. G. & Bless, H. (2022). You and I both: Self-compassion reduces self–other differences in evaluation of showing vulnerability. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. DOI: 10.1177/01461672211031080
Gibson, K. R., Harari, D. & Marr, J. C. (2018). When sharing hurts: How and why self-disclosing weakness undermines the task-oriented relationships of higher status disclosers. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 144, 25–43.
Brooks, A. W., Gino, F. & Schweitzer, M. E. (2015). Smart people ask for (my) advice: Seeking advice boosts perceptions of competence. Management Science, 61(6), 1421–1435.
Hathaway, B. (2018, September 4). At first meeting, people like you more than you think. Yale News. https://news.yale.edu/2018/09/04/first-meeting-people-you-more-you-think
CNBC Make It (2022, December 21). People like you more than you think, Harvard and Penn research shows – how to parlay it into workplace success. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/21/harvard-penn-psychology-research-people-like-you-more-than-you-think.html
