The Liking Gap
The liking gap is the distance between how much people like you after a conversation and how much you think they do. It shows up in teams too, widest between peers.
After your last conversation, the other person almost certainly liked you more than you think. That's the liking gap, named by Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark in 2018.
In their first study, pairs of people in a Yale lab chatted for about five minutes. Afterwards, people on average liked their partner more than they believed their partner liked them.
The signals were there. Coders watching videos of the chats could tell how much people liked each other. The people in the chats missed it. A later study hinted why: their thoughts about their own performance ran harsher than their thoughts about their partner's.
The gap lasts. First-year students underestimated how much their suite mates liked them from September through February. It closed only by May. And in 2021, Adam Mastroianni and colleagues found it in engineering teams on a shared project, with signs it runs widest between peers.
The nudge: This week, tell one peer one specific thing you valued about working with them. "The way you reframed the client's question on Tuesday saved that call." They're almost certainly underestimating it.
Source: Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom & Clark, The liking gap in conversations: Do people like us more than we think?, Psychological Science (2018); Mastroianni, Cooney, Boothby & Reece, The liking gap in groups and teams, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2021)
