It’s probably happened to you: A stranger starts talking to you at a party. In this moment, you’re not nearly as clever or charming as you hoped you’d be, and you struggle to volley with the anecdotes, opinions, and witticisms lobbed your way. At the end of it, you come away thinking, “They totally thought I was a complete idiot.”
But research shows, they probably didn’t. In a phenomenon dubbed the “liking gap,” people consistently tend to like you better than you think they do. All sorts of other “gaps” — or “social prediction errors,” as experts would call them — govern our social lives. We consistently underestimate everything from people’s empathy toward us to how willing they are to help us. These patterns are strongest when we interact with strangers or acquaintances but can persist for many months into a friendship. They permeate relationships with all kinds of people, from classmates to roommates and coworkers. This pessimism about other people’s attitudes toward us also has consequences, like undercutting our own willingness to connect with others.
We misjudge not only other people’s altruism or empathy, but also how they’ll react to our overtures. Other research shows that people consistently underestimate how happy someone will feel after we show them a random act of kindness, pay them a compliment, or shoot a message just to get in touch. This all starts at a pretty young age, too. One 2021 paper found that the liking gap begins appearing in children as young as 5, and research from 2023 showed that children as young as four underestimate how much another person will appreciate an act of kindness.
To some, these may feel like pretty minor points — who cares if people enjoy our compliments more than we think they do? But experts say that these misperceptions of others can be a big obstacle to forming connections, especially in our purported loneliness epidemic.
What we lose when we underestimate others
We doubt others at our own cost, according to Gillian Sandstrom, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Sussex. If we don’t think someone will appreciate a compliment, then we won’t give it. If we don’t think a friend will be happy to hear from us, we won’t reach out. “We get nervous, and then we turn inwards,” Sandstrom says, “and so we’re less happy and more fearful.” We behave as if others don’t like us, possibly shutting them out, hurting our chances of connection, and curtailing any possibility for building new friendships. “If you don’t trust someone will be tender with you, you won’t get vulnerable with them, and you’ll just stay at surface level.”
“It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she adds — if you don’t think someone will help you, you’ll behave in a way that signals that you don’t expect kindness from them, and then they really won’t help.
After all, people generally try to hew to norms and behave according to how they think most people behave. It doesn’t help when so many of us are inundated with bad news, reading and hearing stories that highlight people’s bad qualities. That “reduces our expectations of other people's kindness” and makes the world feel like a riskier place, she says, one where you maybe don’t want to ask for help or extend a hand.
And so, “we’ll miss social opportunities,” she says, “which we know by and large to have a pretty direct impact on our happiness.”
Insecurity — or at least self-consciousness — about our competence, charisma, or likability plays a big role in how we misjudge our interactions. Research shows that we tend to assess our role in conversations by how competent we were, whereas other people tend to focus on our warmth or how nice we seemed.
In the case of giving and receiving compliments, we can all probably think back to a time when someone said something nice out of the blue, and how warm and happy we felt, says Vanessa Bohns, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. But in times when we’re about to give a compliment, “we lose all perspective about what it feels like to be in the other role — we're so focused on how awkwardly we're going to deliver that compliment, the fact that maybe we're interrupting them, or that maybe they don't want to be approached by us right now.”
How to recalibrate
So how do we beat back the pessimism and stop underestimating others? The research so far says there’s no easy answer, says Sandstrom. You can tell people about the data and teach them that people enjoy interactions with you more than you’d predict, but that doesn’t tangibly change people’s attitudes or behaviors.
“The only thing that's really worked is just making people do the scary thing,” Sandstrom says. When people regularly exercise the muscles of talking with strangers, paying compliments, or reaching out to old friends, and see that they go well and are received kindly, then their outlooks start to change. But without regular practice, it’s easy to forget.
All close relationships start somewhere. And that process requires you to open up, be vulnerable, ask for help, and offer it, says Sandstrom. And if you can muster up the bravery to go ahead and trust that the person you’re talking to will be kinder and more open than you instinctively feel, that can open up a lot more opportunities for connection. After all, she says, “somebody has to go first.”
