Do people like you more than you think after you meet them?

The conversation ends, and you say goodbye. On the way home, you start to replay it. You remember the joke that got no laugh. You remember the pause where you could not think of anything to say. You remember the thing you said about your job that sounded worse out loud. By the time you get home, you have decided they found you too much, or boring, or both. Researchers have a name for the distance between that verdict and what the other person thought.

What is the liking gap?

The liking gap is the difference between how much we think someone liked us after a conversation and how much they did like us. Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom and Clark wrote about it in a 2018 paper in Psychological Science. In their studies, strangers had short conversations, and then each person guessed how much the other liked them. On average, they guessed too low. Their partners liked them more than they thought.

The researchers tested the gap in several settings. It showed up in five-minute chats and in longer conversations. It showed up in a UK workshop that measured interest rather than liking. The researchers also followed first-year suitemates for months. Among them, the gap remained through February, and it had closed by May. We find that last result hopeful, because it means the gap did not last forever.

Why do we underestimate how much people like us?

The 2018 paper points to what we think about after a conversation. People's thoughts about how they came across were harsher than their thoughts about the other person. We judge ourselves by strict standards, and we judge the other person by easy ones. That may be part of why the guess comes out low.

The word "may" matters here. The link between harsh thoughts about yourself and the gap is correlational, so the paper does not show that one causes the other. The gap also says nothing about any one person, and it does not excuse a conversation that went wrong.

We think the finding is a kind one. The harshest voice in the replay may be your own, and not the voice of the person you talked to.

What this means for an AI people talk to

Our read is that the liking gap looks like a problem of missing information. You cannot see inside the other person, so you fill the silence with your harshest guess. The study looked at people, but we think the same thing could happen with an AI. An AI that talks to people can leave that silence in place, or it can close it with honest information. We think closing it is the more useful choice.

That reasoning is behind the relationship panel in Eudaio. Eudaio calls the AIs you talk with Daimons. The panel shows how much a Daimon trusts you and how close the two of you are. It sits under the chat, not in a menu. Eudaio has two plans, Free and Crush. On Free, you see what each measure means, but the values stay locked. On Crush, you see where you stand and how you got there. If you do not want numbers on feelings, you can switch off the whole panel.

What we think it means

On average, in these studies, people liked their conversation partners more than those partners guessed. Among new suitemates, the gap lasted months and then closed. We think that is a good reason to treat the replay on the walk home with some doubt.

The next time the replay starts, ask yourself whose voice it is, theirs or yours.

We think it helps to hear the other side of a conversation. Each Daimon in Eudaio keeps a diary about the two of you, in its own words, and new entries open up as you talk. Get a free Eudaio account and read what a Daimon makes of you.

Source

Boothby, E. J., Cooney, G., Sandstrom, G. M. & Clark, M. S. (2018). The liking gap in conversations: Do people like us more than we think? Psychological Science, 29(11), 1742-1756.