You leave the party and the conversation comes with you. Somewhere on the walk home, or in the quiet after the door closes, you start replaying it. That thing you said about your job — too much, too eager. The pause where you couldn’t think of a question. The story that ran a beat too long. By the time you are brushing your teeth, you have arrived at a quiet verdict: they were being polite. You are not sure they liked you.
Here is the part worth sitting with. The other person, in all likelihood, walked home thinking they had met someone they would like to see again — and assuming, just as you did, that the warmth ran mostly one way.
A gap between what happened and what we think happened
In 2018, a team of psychologists led by Erica Boothby gave this small, common ache a name. Across a series of studies published in Psychological Science, they found that after conversations with people they had just met, participants consistently underestimated how much their partners liked them and enjoyed their company. The researchers called the difference between how much you are actually liked and how much you think you are liked the liking gap.
The first demonstration was modest: thirty-six people, recruited from around New Haven, paired off with someone new for a short guided conversation and then rated both how much they liked their partner and how much they believed their partner liked them. The two numbers did not match. People thought they were less liked than they were. A second, larger study with eighty-four participants found the same shape, and the pattern held as the team kept changing the setting.
It was not a quirk of shy undergraduates. In a separate study, the gap showed up among members of the general public recruited at conversation workshops. In another, it held across conversations that lasted two minutes and conversations that ran close to forty-five; longer talks left people liking each other more, but the gap between real and perceived liking stayed open. There was an enjoyment gap, too: people underestimated not just whether they were liked but whether the other person had a good time.
Why we get our own reception so wrong
The interesting question is not that we misjudge, but why we misjudge in one particular direction. We do not tend to overestimate how much new people like us. We undershoot.
One tidy explanation would be that the liking is simply invisible — that people keep their warmth hidden behind politeness, so there is no signal to read. The researchers tested this by having trained observers watch the conversations. The observers could read, from the outside, how much the partners genuinely liked each other — the very thing the partners themselves kept missing. The signals were there. The people sending and receiving them were the ones who failed to notice.
So the problem lives inside us, not in the room. When the team looked at what people were thinking during and after their conversations, a pattern emerged: the more critical your inner commentary about your own performance, the wider your personal liking gap. We are, many of us, running a private audit while we talk — monitoring our words, cataloguing the missteps, bracing for judgment. And lacking any real window into another person’s mind, we reach for the nearest available data: our own opinion of ourselves. We assume they noticed what we noticed. We hand them our self-criticism and imagine they share it.
This is also why the gap is not the same size for everyone. Shyness widened it considerably; people who described themselves as low in shyness barely showed a liking gap at all, while those high in shyness showed a large one. Notably, a person’s sensitivity to rejection did not predict the size of the gap. It seems to be less about a fear of being turned away and more about the quality of attention we turn on ourselves.
It softens, given time
There is a gentle coda in the research. In the longest study, the team followed first-year college students who had been assigned to live near one another, surveying them at several points across the academic year. The liking gap was there in the fall and persisted through most of the year — these were people learning to read new housemates. But by the final survey in the spring, it had closed. Given enough months and enough ordinary contact, people’s sense of how much they were liked finally caught up with reality.
That detail matters for keeping the finding in proportion. The liking gap is most at home in the early days of knowing someone, when we have the least information and the most room to fill it with worry. It is a first-impressions phenomenon, not a permanent condition.
What this research is, and what it isn’t
A note on how we are reading this. We are writers working through the studies, not clinicians, and what follows is an account of one line of research rather than advice or diagnosis. It is worth being careful, because findings about the mind travel fast and tend to harden into self-help slogans on the way.
So, the honest boundaries. This is, at its core, a body of work about averages and about new acquaintances. It describes a tendency across groups, not a law that holds for every person in every conversation; some people read their reception accurately, and not every warm feeling you sense is being underestimated. The participants skewed young, educated, and Western, drawn largely from university towns and a handful of structured settings, so we should be cautious about treating the exact sizes as universal. The link between self-critical thoughts and the gap is a correlation observed alongside the effect, not proof of a single mechanism. And the studies measured fairly contained encounters — a guided chat, a workshop, a dorm — not the full, messy range of human contact.
The finding has held up reasonably well since 2018, extended by later work into groups and teams, which is a point in its favor. But “reasonably well” is the right register. It is one well-built room in a large house, not the whole structure.
What it can offer is small and real: a reason to hold your own post-conversation conclusions a little more loosely. The voice that narrates your missteps on the walk home is not a neutral observer. It is a biased witness, and the research suggests it tends to be wrong in a predictable direction. What it cannot offer is a cure for that voice. If the audit never switches off — if dread of how you came across reliably keeps you from calling the friend, taking the meeting, going back to the party — that is worth taking seriously, and a therapist or counselor is a better companion for it than any single study. Knowing about the liking gap will not dissolve social anxiety. It can, at most, introduce a useful doubt.
That doubt is the whole gift. The next time you replay a conversation and arrive at the familiar verdict that you talked too much, that they were only being kind, you might let the verdict stand as a question instead of a fact. You were there for your own performance. You were not there for theirs.
We are remarkably good at hearing our own worst reviews, and remarkably slow to believe the warmth we have already been shown.
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