Boothby 2018: After Talking, People Are Liked More Than They Know

Two strangers sit side by side at a table in a Yale lab. An experimenter hands them a sheet of ice-breaker questions (“Where are you from?”), leaves a clock on the table, and walks out. They talk for about five minutes. Then each goes to a separate room and fills out a survey: how much did you like your partner, and how much do you think your partner liked you?

If you have been meaning to text someone after a good first meeting, this is the experiment to know about. Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom and Clark (2018, Psychological Science, 29(11), 1742-1756) found that the second answer came out lower than the first. In Study 1a, 36 participants rated their own liking at 5.82 on a 7-point scale and the liking they believed they received at 5.17. Both numbers describe the same conversations, so they cannot both be right. The authors call the difference the liking gap.

The surveys matter for you because the questions were about wanting more. Four items measured perceived liking, including whether the partner would “like to interact with me again,” and those four were averaged into the perceived-liking score that came out low. In Study 1b, outside coders watched 15 of the recorded conversations and their ratings predicted how much the partners actually liked each other, while that actual liking did not significantly predict what participants guessed about being liked. The liking was visible. The people in the room did not pick it up.

The gap was not a quirk of one room. It appeared in 100 workshop attendees from the general public in the UK, where ratings of how interesting the partner was went from 3.59 before the chat to 4.30 after, while the guess about how interesting the partner found you moved only from 3.22 to 3.61. It held across short, medium and long conversations. And in Study 5, 102 first-year suitemates were surveyed in September, October, December, February and May. The gap was significant at the first four surveys, from September through February, and gone by May.

Someone who believes the other side is lukewarm has little reason to send the first message, and that belief outlasted months of living down the hall from each other. The authors’ account is that people are too busy with their own self-critical thoughts to notice the signals that a partner likes them.

The limits are real. These were strangers and new acquaintances, not old friends, and the study measured ratings, not whether anyone later made plans.

So the practical reading is small. Treat “they were probably just being polite” as a measured bias, about 0.65 points on the 7-point scale in Study 1a and 0.36 across the dorm year (the model estimates in the paper), and send the message anyway. Pick the plan before you pick the words. If you want ideas that fit an evening, this list of low-key weeknight plans is a place to start, and if the plan is the part that stalls, Hall’s hours-to-friendship estimates show how many meetings a friendship usually needs.

Dorm mates needed until the fifth survey for the gap to close. The first message is a cheaper way to find out.