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.
AlickeM. D. (1985). Global self-evaluation as determined by the desirability and controllability of trait adjectives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 1621–1630.
2.
AmesD. R.RoseP.AndersonC. P. (2006). The NPI-16 as a short measure of narcissism. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 440–450.
BeckL. A.ClarkM. S. (2010). Looking a gift horse in the mouth as a defense against increasing intimacy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 676–679.
5.
BerensonK. R.GyurakA.AydukÖ.DowneyG.GarnerM. J.MoggK.. . . PineD. S. (2009). Rejection sensitivity and disruption of attention by social threat cues. Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 1064–1072.
6.
BlumbergH. H. (1972). Communication of interpersonal evaluations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23, 157–162.
7.
BrownP.LevinsonS. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Vol. 4). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
8.
BrozovichF.HeimbergR. G. (2008). An analysis of post-event processing in social anxiety disorder. Clinical Psychology Review, 28, 891–903.
ChartrandT. L.BarghJ. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception–behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 893–910.
11.
DeriS.DavidaiS.GilovichT. (2017). Home alone: Why people believe others’ social lives are richer than their own. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113, 858–877.
12.
EisenbergerN. I.LiebermanM. D.WilliamsK. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302, 290–292.
13.
EpleyN.KeysarB.Van BovenL.GilovichT. (2004). Perspective taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 327–339.
14.
EpleyN.SchroederJ. (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143, 1980–1999.
15.
EpstudeK.RoeseN. J. (2008). The functional theory of counterfactual thinking. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12, 168–192.
16.
GarrodS.PickeringM. J. (2004). Why is conversation so easy?Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 8–11.
17.
GilovichT.KrugerJ.MedvecV. H. (2002). The spotlight effect revisited: Overestimating the manifest variability of our actions and appearance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 93–99.
18.
GilovichT.MedvecV. H.SavitskyK. (1998). The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others’ ability to read one’s emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 332–346.
19.
KennyD. A.DePauloB. M. (1993). Do people know how others view them? An empirical and theoretical account. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 145–161.
20.
KeysarB. (2007). Communication and miscommunication: The role of egocentric processes. Intercultural Pragmatics, 4, 71–84.
21.
KrugerJ.DunningD. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1121–1134.
LakinJ. L.JefferisV. E.ChengC. M.ChartrandT. L. (2003). The chameleon effect as social glue: Evidence for the evolutionary significance of nonconscious mimicry. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 27, 145–161.
24.
LenthR. V. (2016). Least-squares means: The R package lsmeans. Journal of Statistical Software, 69(1). doi:10.18637/jss.v069.i01
25.
LiebermanM. D.RosenthalR. (2001). Why introverts can’t always tell who likes them: Multitasking and nonverbal decoding. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 294–310.
26.
McCroskeyJ. C.AndersenJ. F.RichmondV. P.WheelessL. R. (1981). Communication apprehension of elementary and secondary students and teachers. Communication Education, 30, 122–132.
27.
MorN.WinquistJ. (2002). Self-focused attention and negative affect: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 638–662.
28.
ProninE.KrugerJ.SavitskyK.RossL. (2001). You don’t know me, but I know you: The illusion of asymmetric insight. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 639–656.
29.
R Core Team. (2008). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
30.
RichardsonD. C.DaleR.KirkhamN. Z. (2007). The art of conversation is coordination. Psychological Science, 18, 407–413.
31.
RosenbergM. (1965). Society and the adolescent self-image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
32.
SavitskyK.EpleyN.GilovichT. (2001). Do others judge us as harshly as we think? Overestimating the impact of our failures, shortcomings, and mishaps. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 44–56.
33.
SavitskyK.GilovichT. (2003). The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 618–625.
34.
SchegloffE. A.JeffersonG.SacksH. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53, 361–382.
35.
SchlenkerB. R.LearyM. R. (1982). Social anxiety and self-presentation: A conceptualization model. Psychological Bulletin, 92, 641–669.
36.
StiversT.EnfieldN. J.BrownP.EnglertC.HayashiM.HeinemannT.. . . LevinsonS. C. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 106, 10587–10592.
37.
SwannW. B.Stein-SeroussiA.McNultyS. E. (1992). Outcasts in a white-lie society: The enigmatic worlds of people with negative self-conceptions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 618–624.
38.
TesserA.RosenS. (1975). The reluctance to transmit bad news. In BerkowitzL. (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 8, pp. 193–232). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
39.
Van BovenL.LoewensteinG.DunningD. (2005). The illusion of courage in social predictions: Underestimating the impact of fear of embarrassment on other people. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 96, 130–141.
40.
WeinsteinN. (1980). Unrealistic optimism about future life events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 806–820.
41.
WhillansA. V.ChristieC. D.CheungS.JordanA. H.ChenF. S. (2017). From misperception to social connection: Correlates and consequences of overestimating others’ social connectedness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43, 1696–1711.
42.
WilliamsE. F.GilovichT.DunningD. (2012). Being all that you can be. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 143–154.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
