The Liking gap

Having conversations with new people is an important and rewarding part of social life. Yet conversations are also intimidating and anxiety provoking, and people wonder and worry about what their conversation partners really think of them. Are people accurate in their estimates?

Because it can be hard to tell what others think, people often make their estimates by substituting their own thoughts as a proxy, but Erica’s research shows that this egocentric bias can be harmful. People can be their own harshest critics and it can be all too easy to focus on one’s own flaws and faux pas in a social interaction with someone new—the things they can improve for next time. And so, when people estimate how much others like them, they use information that is accessible to them but inaccessible to their partner—their own inner monologue, which tends to be excessively harsh. The result is a systematic underestimation of how much one is liked by others, a bias we refer to as the liking gap (Boothby*, Cooney*, Sandstrom, & Clark, 2018).

The liking gap has been observed the liking gap as strangers get acquainted in the lab, as first year college students get to know their dorm mates, as formerly unacquainted members of the general public get to know each other during a professional development workshop. The liking gap persists in conversations of varying lengths, and even for the better part of a year in one case as college dorm mates develop new relationships.

The liking gap also exists in the workplace among teams and colleagues—and people’s beliefs about how much their colleagues like them predict several important outcomes, such as their willingness to ask their colleagues for help, their willingness to provide their colleagues with open and honest feedback, their desire to work together on future projects, and even their satisfaction with their job (Mastroianni*, Cooney*, Boothby, & Reece, 2021).

conversation pessimism

In other related work, Erica investigates people’s anxieties about the impressions they make in everyday casual conversation. People exhibit a pronounced lack confidence in their conversational abilities, as compared to their abilities in other common daily activities and to their perceptions of the conversational ability of their peers. One important concomitant of these pessimistic self-assessments is a reversal of the normal self-serving pattern of attributions for the positive and negative moments in participants’ conversations: people blame themselves more for the worst moments of a conversation than they blame their conversation partner, exhibiting a reversal of the standard pattern of attribution. Furthermore, people’s negative view of themselves as conversationalists is associated with a desire for more social connection and a tendency to pass up opportunities to socialize with others (Welker, Walker, Boothby, & Gilovich, under review).

Erica’s research shows that people underestimate how much others are interested in talking to them even when all they’re doing is giving someone a compliment (Boothby & Bohns, 2021). But the good news is people’s fears are overblown—although they often expect the worst, things usually go much better than they expect (Sandstrom & Boothby, 2021).

To see if they could reduce the psychological barriers to striking up conversations with someone new, Erica and her collaborators staged a week-long multisite intervention isolating two of people’s biggest concerns—fear of rejection and doubts about one’s own conversational ability—and giving people opportunities to repeatedly practice talking to strangers via a scavenger hunt game app on their phone (Sandstrom*, Boothby*, & Cooney*, 2022). By the end of the week, participants grew more optimistic about their conversational abilities and expected to be rejected significantly less. Furthermore, talking to strangers increased feelings of trust in others and decreased feelings of social isolation.

Overall, this work suggests that conversation is often experienced as a particularly fraught social exercise, despite its ubiquity and importance in everyday life, with implications for people’s ability to network effectively and make meaningful connections in their personal and professional lives.