Insecurity leads us to underestimate how much others like us

After meeting someone for the first time, we tend to underestimate how much they like us. This 'liking gap' has turned up in research with children as young as five, as well as adults, though the size of the gap varies widely from person to person.

Now, Hasagani Tissera at the University of Toronto and colleagues have found hints as to why some people experience a bigger liking gap than others. Not only that, but this latest work, published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences, identifies not just one type of liking gap, but two.

The researchers studied a total of 2,753 people, in three different groups. The first group consisted of 863 strangers who took part in round-robin 'getting to know you' sessions. Each chat lasted two to three minutes. The second group comprised 378 students also came into the lab, where they chatted with a series of partners about whatever they wanted for twelve minutes. A third and final group of 1,465 US-based adults took part in 25-minute-long chats with a stranger, all conducted online.

After each conversation, all of the participants rated how much they liked their partner and how much they thought their partner liked them, as well as reported how much they had enjoyed the meeting itself.

The team's analysis of these results showed, as expected, consistent liking gaps; the vast majority of participants felt that their conversation partners liked them less than they actually did. Only a few participants walked away thinking that the other person liked them more than they actually did.

All of the participants also completed at least one measure of their personal adjustment to be considered alongside their liking ratings. The first group completed scales that assessed self-esteem, social anxiety, loneliness, life satisfaction, perceptions of having positive relations with other people and neuroticism. The second reported on their self-esteem. The third completed measured of neuroticism and loneliness.

In this study, the team distinguished between the previously documented type of liking gap — which they call the 'actual liking gap' — and another, which they dub the 'perceived liking gap'. The perceived liking gap is the difference between how much someone likes the other person versus how much they believe the other person likes them back. This type of liking gap occurs entirely in their own mind, as opposed to being an actual gap in how much they're liked.

The researchers' analysis revealed that bigger negative perceived liking gaps were related to indicators of insecurity, such as lower self-esteem and higher social anxiety. They suggest that this might happen because more insecure people have learned to lack confidence in social situations, whereas people who are 'better adjusted' tend to believe that they are better liked by others. The results suggest that this happens regardless of how much they like others or how much they were liked by others, the team writes.

Their analysis showed, however, that there was no link between any of the measures of personal adjustment and the size of the actual liking gap. What's more, neither the actual nor the perceived gap was linked to how much the participants enjoyed their interaction.

This latter observation seems somewhat surprising, but the researchers stress that further investigations should be done before concluding that there is little interaction between these gaps and the dynamics of any given interaction. In the real world, for example, there may be situations — such as a job interview or a date (rather than an inconsequential chat) in which an actual liking gap does affect enjoyment, and even the success of the exchange, the team suggests.

Gaps in our understanding of how people perceive us also seem to reach beyond the liking gap. As the team notes, some recent work has found that we also tend to underestimate how positively our personality traits are seen. Continued work in this area will only add to an expanding understanding of biases in our perceptions of how positively other people see us — and help to paint a more nuanced picture of when these biases matter, and what influences them.

Read the paper in full:
Tissera, H., Elsaadawy, N., Cooney, G., Human, L. J., & Carlson, E. N. (2025). Evaluating the psychological and social nature of actual and perceived liking gaps. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences, 128(4), 967–982. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000548

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