I’d like to introduce you to a recently discovered phenomenon known as the “liking gap”, which leads us to ignore the potential for connection—even when it is staring us in the face. … A few years ago, the psychologist Erica Boothby happened to be engaged in a conversation with a new acquaintance, while her partner—another psychologist, Gus Cooney—stood close by. After the conversation, Boothby was worried that she’d made a bad impression. To Cooney’s ear, however, the exchange had been warm and friendly. What could possibly have gone wrong?
As the two psychologists chatted about the event, they began to wonder whether this is a common human experience—that after a meeting, we consistently underestimate how much the other person enjoyed our company. We lose faith in the shared reality created in the first meeting, and our doubts weaken the bond that had formed. Boothby and Cooney named the phenomenon the “liking gap”—and set about investigating its prevalence.
In the first study, participants were placed into pairs and given a five-minute ice-breaking task, before answering questionnaires about how much they liked the other person, how much they thought the other person liked them, and whether they would like to see each other again. As the researchers had hypothesised, most people were overly pessimistic about the impression that they’d given, as they started to question whether they’d really established a mutual understanding. In general, the other person liked them a lot more, and would have been much keener to follow up with another meeting, than they ever imagined.
The “liking gap” is the reason we may enthusiastically exchange numbers or emails with a new acquaintance—but then never send a message or make a call. Boothby and Cooney’s initial findings have been replicated many times, with one experiment showing that the liking gap can linger through months of regular contact with people.
Despite living together, university roommates continued to feel insecure about the ways their companions viewed them for the best part of a year, for instance. Later research has shown that the “liking gap” is also prevalent among colleagues in the workplace, where it can limit creative collaborations.
When I first read about the “liking gap”, I couldn’t help but flinch while thinking about all the times I might have ignored overtures of friendship. As a science writer specialising in psychology and neuroscience, however, I was deeply excited. Since the 1970s, behavioural economists such as Daniel Kahneman have been outlining the many cognitive biases that lead our financial decisions astray. Now we seemed to be witnessing the birth of a whole subfield of social psychology that could do exactly the same for our relationships.
I wasn’t wrong. Over the past few years, social psychologists have written a torrent of papers outlining the many judgement errors that prevent us from connecting with other people and the ways to overcome them. These new findings cover everything from our fear of making new acquaintances to the complexities of navigating disagreement and conflict.
For example, we vastly overestimate how awkward it will be to talk to someone we don’t know, but people are often more than grateful to strike up a conversation with a stranger—with huge benefits for everyone’s well-being. And when we do have the chance to connect, we shy away from discussing deeper topics in favour of superficial small talk, yet it is exactly the more profound conversation that would foster the creation of a shared reality. Equally importantly, our compliments and our apologies are often woefully misjudged, so that we fail to say the words that would help us to reinforce or repair the mutual understanding that is essential for a strong bond. And our fears of seeming needy or incompetent prevent us from asking for help, when a simple request for assistance can increase our standing in others’ eyes. Indeed, asking for a favour is counterintuitively one of the best ways to build a rapport with someone, improving both your and their well-being.
These are just a few of the ways our intuitions prevent us from establishing the mutual understanding that contributes to more meaningful relationships.
Excerpted with permission from The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets Of Building A Strong Social Network, by David Robson, published by Canongate.
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