Liking Gap
The liking gap is the finding that after a conversation with someone new, people tend to underestimate how much their partner liked them and enjoyed their company. Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark reported it in 2018 in Psychological Science.
What it is
The measure pairs a forecast with a report. After talking, each person says how much they think their partner liked them, and each partner says how much they actually did. The liking gap is the difference, and in the 2018 paper the partner's own report ran higher than the forecast.
It is a close companion to the spotlight effect. Both set a person's guess about how others see them against what the others report. The spotlight effect concerns how much others notice, and the liking gap concerns how warmly they regard the person.
In effect
The paper reports the gap in three settings: strangers meeting in a laboratory, first-year college students living in the same hall, and members of the public at a personal development workshop. It persisted across conversations of different lengths. Among the students in the halls it persisted for months as they formed new relationships.
What it does not say
The finding concerns conversations with new people and a person's estimate of their partner's liking. It does not address every kind of relationship or every kind of conversation, and this page rests on the 2018 paper's reported findings in those three settings.
Sources
- 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. doi:10.1177/0956797618783714