[Music] conversations with new people can be sort of terrifying I mean they can also be awesome there's always a chance you're about to learn something fascinating or add a cool new friend to your life you are making a first impression and at some point you might be left with a creeping sense of did they actually like me most of us are willing to believe that other people find us perfectly tolerable but it can be hard to tell whether they liked you enough to want to spend time with you again psychologists think that we might be too hard on ourselves though most of the time people probably like you better

after talking to you then you think they do it's called the liking gap but if you know it's there well maybe you can chill out about first impressions and just enjoy your time with new people psychologists have been studying meta accuracy or your ability to correctly judge others feelings about you for a long time but the study that gave the liking gap its name was published in 2018 in the journal Psychological Science it looked at participants encounters with new people and five different experiments some of the experiments asked undergrads to talk with new people for five minutes or for as long as they liked and others participants spoke with people they met

at a workshop or reported on their relationships with their roommates over the course of their freshman year of college the researchers found that participants consistently underestimated how much their partner liked them and assumed they'd enjoyed the conversation more than their partner had no matter how long or short the conversation being shy predicted an even bigger liking gap in the roommates they kept experiencing the liking gap in all the check-ins throughout the academic year except for the very last one in May well this could suggest you'll eventually figure out that people really do like you the gap might have gone away because by then

they discuss how well they got along and decided whether or not they wanted to live together again it's worth noting that we're not talking about social anxiety disorder here while social anxiety disorder is all about the fear of being negatively judged or rejected in social situations it's a much more intense anxiety that affects your day-to-day life and your ability to spend time with friends and family that's probably best treated by a psychiatrist or therapist the liking gap is a less extreme more Universal tendency to underestimate how much other people like you and it's actually kind of surprising that it exists because

people usually think their greatest stuff studies have repeatedly found a better-than-average effect where people tend to think they're better than the average person at things like driving a car even though obviously we can't all be better than average because you know math but there are a number of factors that can help explain the liking gap one is the situation itself because conversations can be stressful something as simple as wanting to present yourself well has been shown to change the way people evaluate their performance conversations are also hard like literally cognitively demanding you have

to listen while also mentally rehearsing that clever anecdote you're about to tell and then oh no wait the moment went by would it be weird if you told it now and then ill what was the question which means that we often aren't paying attention to the subtle cues other people are giving us but even if you are researchers have suggested that people might not provide enough useful feedback for you to come to the conclusion that they like you either out of politeness or out of a fear of being rejected themselves for instance 1 1972 study of nearly 200 undergraduates found that people tend to hold back both positive and negative evaluations of others

especially when they're not very close to the person they're making judgments about so given that conversations are messy and confusing we often base our estimates of how much other people like us on the best set of data we have our own views of ourselves which can be misguided psychologists have suggested that you guess what other people are thinking of you by taking baby steps away from your own point of view until you reach something that seems plausible but of course we're super biased about what's plausible for one thing you might not be taking into account the fact that people you've never met tend to assume that you

conform to social norms they expect you to be kind because most people are kind to strangers and don't start yelling at them with no provocation this isn't the sims but also researchers have found that social situations make people focus much more on their own failings which makes evolutionary sense it's good to learn from your social mistakes so that you don't get kicked off the island you also have a lot of previous experiences to compare yourself against so you might notice that your performance in this conversation is considerably less great than all the other conversations you've ever had that badly delivered punchlines

sticks out like a sore thumb to you in other words we judge ourselves too harshly and then assume other people are making judgments similar to ours resulting in a liking gap this isn't something you can just change about your brain overnight but just knowing that the liking gap exists can be kind of comforting because the people you meet probably liked you more than you think they do and that's honestly kind of awesome news thanks for watching this episode of scishow psyche I'll just tell you straight up and leave the guesswork out of it if you're a fan of free resources for science education we like you a lot and hey we have something in common you

also might be interested in joining our community over on patreon whose support is what allowed us to create this channel in the first place just go to patreon.com/scishow to check it out [Music]