It turns out that people are more interesting than they give themselves credit for.
Human nature compels us to constantly self-monitor our actions and words and guess at how others see us. Do, for instance, people think we’re interesting, fun, dreary?
“Our research suggests that accurately estimating how much a new conversation partner likes us — even though this is a fundamental part of social life and something we have ample practice with — is a much more difficult task than we imagine,” say Erica Boothby, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, and Gus Cooney, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, U.S., in a statement.
This mismatch has been termed the ‘liking gap,’ and can hinder our abilities to form healthy relationships.
To look at this, the researchers examined various aspects of this gap in a series of five studies.
In one study, they paired participants who had not met before, and tasked them with having a five-minute conversation featuring typical icebreaker questions — for example, ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘What are your hobbies?’ At the end of the conversation, the participants answered questions that gauged how much they liked their conversation partner and how much they thought their conversation partner liked them.
The findings
On average, the ratings showed that participants liked their partner more than they thought their partner liked them. Since it can’t logically be the case that both people in a conversation like their partner more than their partner likes them, this disparity in average ratings suggests that participants tended to make an estimation error. Analyses of video recordings suggested that participants were not accounting for their partner’s behavioural signals indicating interest and enjoyment.
In a separate study, participants reflected on the conversations they’d just had — according to their ratings, they believed that the salient moments that shaped their partner’s thoughts about them were more negative than the moments that shaped their own thoughts about their partner.
“They seem to be too wrapped up in their own worries about what they should say or did say to see signals of others’ liking for them, which observers of the conversation see right away,” said one of the authors.
The ‘liking gap’ emerged regardless of the length of conversations and the effect of this gap could persist over months.
The phenomenon contrasts with the well-established finding that we generally view ourselves more positively than we do others, whether we’re thinking about our driving skills, our intelligence, or our chance of experiencing negative outcomes such as illness or divorce.
The researchers hypothesise that this difference may come down to the context in which we make these self-assessments. When there is another person involved, such as a conversation partner, we may be more cautious and self-critical than in situations when we are rating our own qualities with no other source of input. — Adapted from Science Daily, American Psychological Association
jacob.koshy@thehindu.co.in
