We have all had the experience of walking away from a conversation
with an interesting new acquaintance, wondering if the other person
liked us as much as we liked them. All too often, we end up feeling a
bit deflated and assume that we made a bad first impression by talking too much, not talking enough, or by not coming across as articulate and witty.
As it turns out, you are probably being too hard on yourself.
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| PHOTO: shutterstock |
The "Liking Gap"
Researchers have identified something known as the "liking gap,”
which is our tendency to underestimate how much other people like us
following an initial conversation.
Psychologist Erica Boothby and her colleagues recently published a series of five studies
in which strangers had conversations with each other and then evaluated
how much they liked their conversation partner, and also how much they
thought their partner liked them back. Repeatedly, the researchers found
that people reported liking their partners significantly more than they
thought their partners liked them in return, and they also found the
conversations to be more enjoyable and interesting than they thought
their partners did.
This finding occurred in laboratory situations, as well as in
real-life workshops attended by people who wanted to learn “how to talk
with strangers,” and the effect was especially pronounced among people
who scored high on measures of shyness.
It was clear from Boothby’s studies that the problem was due to a
failure to correctly read the signals that were being sent by one’s
conversational partner, because individuals who viewed videotapes of the
conversations were able to more accurately judge the degree of liking
that people had for each other than were the participants themselves!
So, what is going on here?
Conversations Are Funny Things
Conversations with new people can be tricky to navigate. Other people do not yet understand your sense of humor
(or lack thereof), and neither of you knows how much common knowledge
you share or how closely your attitudes line up. Consequently, the
conversation becomes a dance in which two people probe for feedback that
can help to manage the awkwardness between them. Boothby describes
conversations as “conspiracies of politeness” in which people abide by
social norms and advance socially desirable versions of themselves.
Needless to say, conversations involving more than two people become even more complicated.
And conversations require that we successfully balance the “push”
forces that keep people apart and the “pull” forces that bring them
together. On the one hand, we want to get to know the other person, and
we want them to like us (the "pull" forces), but at the same time we may
be afraid of social rejection or of revealing too much, which may leave
us in a vulnerable position (the “push” forces).
In such conversations, other social psychological traps, such as the “spotlight effect,”
can lead us to become too self-critical. The spotlight effect occurs
when we overestimate the extent to which other people are focusing on
us, especially on our shortcomings. We beat ourselves up over every
physical imperfection, every awkward question, and every lame joke — and
we think that other people remember these things more vividly and judge
us more harshly than they actually do. Becoming aware of the spotlight
effect can help put you at ease in social situations and make you more
interpersonally effective.
Hence, Boothby and her colleagues concluded that other people we
converse with are in fact communicating how much they like us, both
verbally and nonverbally, but our fear of embarrassment
and our preoccupation with the minutiae of self-presentation gets in
the way — causing us to miss the very signals that we so hope to see.
Part of becoming a good conversationalist is accurately deciphering
how others feel about us. Coming to terms with the liking gap may be a
good first step.
ABOUT AUTHOR
Frank McAndrew, Ph.D., is the Cornelia H. Dudley Professor of Psychology at Knox College.
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