The “liking gap” – we tend to underestimate the positive first impression we make on strangers

This study also revealed an “enjoyment gap”: regardless of the length of the conversation, the participants under-estimated how much their partner enjoyed it.  The fourth and fifth studies moved the investigation out of the lab, into real-world settings: workshops for entrepreneurs and members of the British public on “how to talk to strangers”, and into first-year dormitory suites at Yale University.   The workshop data (involving 100 people) showed that participants tended to predict that their conversation partner would find them less interesting than they would find their partner to be – a mistaken belief that was magnified after the conversation. The dorm study, meanwhile, surveyed new students at the start of the fall semester, in September, and then at four further points until May and found that they under-estimated how much their suite-mates liked them at all of the time-points except for the final one. Clearly, the liking gap can persist for a long time.  “Conversation appears to be a domain in which people display uncharacteristic pessimism about their performance,” the researchers note.  This might be adaptive in a way because a bias toward reflecting on our conversational mistakes might prompt us to perform better next time. Strangers, on the other hand, are judging us according a different metric – they have no idea of the performance we’re aiming for, and so no clue when we fall short of that target – making them less c...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Social Source Type: blogs