They liked you more than you think
After a first conversation, we keep deciding we were liked less than we were. It’s an illusion with a clear mechanism, and you can get around it.
At Yale, strangers were paired up and given five minutes to talk. Then they were taken to separate rooms, and each was asked to answer on a scale from one to seven: how much did you like your partner? And how much do you think your partner liked you? On average, people liked each other equally. But they left convinced that they had liked their partner more than their partner had liked them.
Try it on yourself
Think of the last new person you talked to. Two marks on the same scale, from one to seven.
Simplified: in the study each score was the average of four questions, here it is one. The Yale numbers are averages from the first study, about 35 people.
Psychologists called this the liking gap, and they have found it again and again since: in long conversations, over video calls, in other countries. It seems to be how the start of an acquaintance works. But why do we always err downwards?
The viewer and the critic
When we judge someone else, we are viewers. We watch how they talk and listen, and we judge by what we can see. When we judge ourselves, another role switches on: the critic. It plays by its own rules, though it doesn’t feel that way.
The critic judges by what’s inside. After a conversation it replays it, and the slips sound loudest: a pause, a joke that fell flat, a question asked twice. The more of these thoughts people had, the wider their gap. It is sure that everyone saw your nerves and drew conclusions, though from outside they show much less. And it barely looks at the other person. When outsiders watched videos of these conversations, they guessed fairly well how much the partner liked the participant. The participants themselves left that liking out of their own estimate. In general, we judge how others see us by how we see ourselves.
The viewer watches the other person; the critic watches you. That’s why it’s clearer from outside.
When the critic gets louder
Among the shyest participants, the gap was more than a whole point on the seven-point scale; among the most relaxed, it was almost gone. In a sample of almost three thousand people, it is wider in those with lower self-esteem and more social anxiety.
The mechanics are simple. The more it matters to you how you come across, the more attention goes inwards, to yourself, and the less is left for the other person. After the meeting the critic speaks again, and from the whole conversation it recalls the bad parts first. The longer you go over how you looked, the more it seems to matter, and the louder the critic gets. Praise also has a hard time reaching it. People usually take in good feedback about themselves more readily than bad. People with strong social anxiety don’t have that tilt, and the difference was still there a year later.
So if you spend hours picking yourself apart after a meeting, your own review of the conversation is the one to trust least. If you weren’t rude and didn’t break the obvious rules of conversation, the feeling “they didn’t like me” is more likely the critic’s mistake than an observation.
Getting the viewer’s eyes back
If it’s clearer from outside, it would help to see yourself through the viewer’s eyes. You can do that literally. People gave a speech, then watched the recording. Some of them were first asked to picture what they would see, and to watch the video as if a stranger were on the screen. They rated their performance higher than before watching, and higher than those who simply watched. Still, the picture in your head changes more than your behaviour: in a similar experiment, anxiety dropped only a little after the video, and people didn’t stop avoiding speeches.
There’s a way without a camera, too. Before meeting someone they needed to impress, people were asked to think about themselves not as “I”, but by name or as “you”. They were less anxious, and outside raters judged that they did better. A name creates distance: you think of yourself as another person, that is, as a viewer.
Knowing doesn’t switch the feeling off. But it lets you stop deciding by it.
What it stops us doing
The costliest part of this mistake happens after the conversation. When we decide whether to message someone again, we lean on the critic’s score, and it is too low. And from there we keep erring the same way. A message “just because” pleases people more than we think. Passengers on a train are sure it’s better to stay quiet, though a journey with a conversation turns out more pleasant. And a serious topic with someone you barely know brings you closer, and turns out awkward less often, than people expect.
Friendship grows out of hours spent together: the more of them, the closer people get. The first of those hours starts with a second conversation. I think many people who never became friends got lost right here: after an awkward first meeting, each waited for the other to write.
What to do about it
Replay the conversation as a viewer. Not your pauses, but what the other person did: did they ask questions, did they listen, were they in no hurry to leave? That’s how the observers at Yale watched, from outside, and they read the partner’s liking fairly well.
Go over the meeting in the third person. Use your name, or “she” or “he”: “Why did she go so quiet?” sounds calmer than “Why did I go so quiet?” It makes it easier to look from outside.
Write first. They’ll be gladder than you expect.
Don’t hold back kind words. Their critic is probably lying to them just as yours lies to you. Saying you enjoyed the talk, or liked something they said, is easy, and it’s exactly what a critic can’t fail to hear.
Your review was written before the conversation
At open meetings in Britain, where people came to learn to start conversations with strangers, participants were sure before saying a word that they would be less interesting to their partner than their partner to them. After the conversation both ratings rose, but the rating of the partner rose almost twice as much, and the gap grew wider. So even a good meeting doesn’t convince the critic: it credits the good parts to the other person, not to you.
So waiting for it to calm down on its own is pointless. It’s like the Müller-Lyer illusion: two equal lines with arrows at their ends look different lengths even after you’ve measured them with a ruler. You can’t retrain the eye, but you can measure with a ruler. Here, the ruler is what the other person did.
Write to the person you felt awkward with yesterday.
Retell it in 20 seconds
We judge others as viewers, and ourselves as a critic who hears only our own pauses. That’s why, after meeting someone, it seems they liked you less than they did. What helps is the outside view: remember what the other person did, go over the meeting in the third person, and write first.
For the friend who’s sure they “ruined everything” after meeting someone.
How strong is this?
After a first conversation, people underestimate how much they were liked
StrongDifferent labs, countries, video calls; all of it self-report.
The cause is the critic: attention on yourself and replaying slips
EarlyThe links are correlations; the partner’s signals rest on 15 videos.
The shy and unsure err more
EarlyA small group in the first study and correlations in a large sample.
Seeing yourself from outside lifts how you rate yourself
StrongSeveral studies with video; the effect on how people rate their own performance repeats.
…and changes what you do
EarlyAfter the video, people didn’t stop avoiding speeches.
Talking to yourself by name eases nerves
EarlyOne lab.
People are gladder to hear from us than we expect
StrongSeveral groups, field experiments.
Where it may not hold. Almost all the data is about a first conversation with a stranger, mostly among students in the US and Britain.
Sources
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Anonymous. It’s how Tim decides what to write next.
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