The Liking Gap: People Like You More Than You Think, and It Is Costing You Friends

You walk out of the coffee, or the class, or the first proper chat with the new colleague, and the audit begins. You talked too much about your job. That joke landed wrong. They were being polite. Verdict: they were fine, you were a bit much, and they will not be thinking about you again.

Now here is what the other person is doing at the same moment. Roughly the same audit, about themselves. And when researchers stepped in and asked both people, privately, how much they liked each other, the answer was the same on both sides: more than either of them guessed.

This has a name. It is the liking gap, and it turns out to be one of the most reliable findings about how conversations end.

The study

In 2018, Erica Boothby and Gus Cooney, then at Cornell and Harvard, together with Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark, published The Liking Gap in Conversations in Psychological Science. The design was simple. Pair strangers, let them talk, then ask each person two things: how much did you like your partner, and how much do you think your partner liked you?

Across five studies, the second number was consistently lower than the truth. People underestimated how much their partner liked them and how much the partner had enjoyed the conversation. The researchers checked whether this was just modesty, or people hedging their bets, and it was not. Participants genuinely believed they had come across worse than they had.

Then they tested whether it wore off. It did not. In one study, first-year students were followed as they got to know their dorm mates. The liking gap was still there months later. People who had lived down the corridor from each other since September were, by the following spring, still underestimating how much the other person liked them. The gap also showed up among adults at a personal development workshop, so it is not a student quirk.

One more result, and it is the one that matters most for anyone who finds friendship hard. The shyer a participant was, the larger their liking gap. The people who most needed an accurate read on whether they were liked were the ones whose read was furthest off.

Why the gap exists

Boothby and her colleagues offer an explanation that fits everything we see. During a conversation, you have access to two streams of information. One is what the other person is doing: smiling, asking questions, laughing. The other is your own inner commentary: I'm rambling, that was awkward, why did I say that. The second stream is loud, constant, and only you can hear it.

Your partner sees only the first stream. They see you smiling and asking questions. They do not hear your commentary, so they rate you on your behaviour. You rate yourself on the commentary. The gap is the difference between the two, and it is why the audit on the walk home is always harsher than the evidence.

This is the same machinery behind the social hangover, the replay of every conversation afterward. The replay runs on the inner commentary, which is precisely the data the other person never had.

What the gap does to new friendships

The liking gap would be a harmless curiosity if conversations did not have consequences. They do. Every potential friendship has a moment after the first meeting where somebody has to make the second move. A message, a "we should do that again," an invitation. And the liking gap decides whether that move gets made.

If you believe the other person found you a bit much, you do not send the message. You wait for them, as proof they were interested. They are running the same calculation and waiting for you. Two people who liked each other, both waiting for evidence the other one is holding, until the moment passes and the friendship dies of mutual misreading.

We can see this happen on YaraCircle with unusual clarity, because we can observe both sides of a first conversation and what each person does afterward. After a chat ends, either person can send a friend request. What we see is a large number of conversations that were, by every observable signal, going well, where neither person sends it. Not because it went badly. Because each was waiting to be chosen. When we have asked people why they did not follow up on a conversation they described as good, the most common answer is some version of "I didn't think they were that into it."

That sentence is the liking gap, verbatim.

Who suffers it most

Three groups, and you may recognise yourself in more than one.

Shy and socially anxious people, for whom the study found the largest gap. If you have spent years assuming people tolerate you, this is the finding that says your instrument is miscalibrated, in a specific and measurable direction.

People in new situations. The gap is widest with strangers and shrinks, slowly, as people get to know each other. The first conversation, the first week in a new city, the first month in a job: the moments when you most need to make a second move are the moments your estimate is worst.

Anyone who has been lonely for a while. Loneliness raises threat sensitivity, as we described in why loneliness makes you say no, and threat sensitivity makes ambiguous signals read as rejection. A lonely person has a liking gap on top of a liking gap.

How to use this

Knowing about the gap does not make it disappear. Boothby's participants were not cured by being told. What helps is changing what you do with the estimate, since the estimate itself is not going to get more accurate.

Add a correction, then act on the corrected number. After a first conversation, take your gut read of how much they liked you and move it up a notch. Not to fantasy. One notch. Then act as though the corrected number is true. If you would send a message to someone who liked you a seven out of ten, and your gut says five, send it. The research says the seven is closer to reality.

Treat "I don't think they were that into it" as a symptom. When that exact thought appears, it is not information about the other person. It is the gap talking. The only way to get real information is to make the second move and see what comes back, which is what our post on the reach-out gap covers: the recipient is more pleased than you predict, too. Both errors run in your favour, and both are invisible until you test them.

Send the small thing within a day. The gap grows the longer you replay the conversation, because the replay feeds on inner commentary. A message sent the same evening is sent on the evidence. A message drafted a week later is sent on the audit, which usually means it is not sent at all. Something tiny and specific: "That thing you said about your sister's café, is it actually open on Sundays?" You are not declaring anything. You are giving them the chance to prove the gap wrong.

Remember the other person has one too. The strangest part of this research is that the person you are sure did not like you is, at that moment, worried you did not like them. The polite reserve you are reading as disinterest is their liking gap. One of you has to go first, and the research says whoever does will usually be relieved.

The bigger point

Most advice about making friends assumes the problem is supply. Not enough people, not enough events, not enough time. The liking gap suggests a different problem: plenty of people who liked each other and never found out, because both were waiting for a signal the other was too unsure to send.

If that is true, then a surprising share of the friends you could have had are people you already met. The conversation went fine. They liked you. You walked home, ran the audit, and decided not to bother them. That is the cost of the gap, and it is paid in friendships that were half-formed and abandoned by both parties at once.

We built a platform around a small conviction that follows from this research: the hardest part of friendship is not meeting people, it is the second message. The first conversation is easy to arrange. What people need is a lower-stakes way to find out whether the other person wanted to continue, before the audit convinces them otherwise. We see, every day, how many people would have a friend by now if they had trusted the corrected number.

People also ask

What is the liking gap? The consistent tendency to underestimate how much a new acquaintance liked you and enjoyed talking to you. It was identified in a 2018 Psychological Science study across lab conversations, dorm mates and workshop participants, and it persisted for months.

Why do I always think people don't like me after a conversation? Because you judge yourself on your inner commentary, the running critique only you can hear, while the other person judges you on your behaviour. The gap between those two data sources is the liking gap, and it is largest for shy and lonely people.

Do people like me more than I think? On average, yes. In every setting the researchers tested, participants' partners liked them more than they estimated. The effect held even months into a relationship.

How do I get over the liking gap? You cannot recalibrate the feeling, but you can correct for it: move your gut estimate up one notch and act on the corrected number. Send a small follow-up message within a day, before replaying the conversation makes the estimate worse.

Does the liking gap explain why new friendships fizzle? Often. After a good first conversation, both people underestimate how liked they were, so both wait for the other to make the second move. The friendship ends through mutual misreading rather than lack of interest.