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Strangers underestimate how much you're liked
The liking gap
Researchers call this the liking gap. Someone who expects rejection is a lot less likely to get it than they think, so the sensible starting assumption is that new people like you until shown otherwise.
Familiarity and repetition
A second effect pushes in the same direction. People tend to like others simply because they are familiar, an unconscious pull called the mere exposure effect. That favors activities that repeat over one-off events: a regular professional development group puts the same faces in front of a person over time, while a networking event does not.
Familiarity takes a few meetings to build, and the first one is usually uncomfortable. An awkward first night at a book club is part of the process, and it is no reason to stop going.
After a good talk
Once a conversation has gone well, the natural next step is to say it was great to talk, say there is interest in connecting further, and ask whether exchanging contact information works.
Why do people underestimate how much they are liked?
A 2018 study in Psychological Science by Erica Boothby and colleagues had strangers talk and then rate each other. Partners consistently liked each other more than they believed the other person liked them. The researchers pointed to people's harsh view of their own conversation, since attention goes to their own flaws while the partner is mostly thinking about what to say next. The gap also showed up among first-year university students living in the same residence, and it lasted for months.
Why do people overestimate how closely others watch them?
Thomas Gilovich and colleagues at Cornell University named this the spotlight effect in a 2000 study. Students were asked to walk into a room wearing a Barry Manilow T-shirt that most of them found embarrassing. The students guessed that about half of the people in the room would notice it, and only about a quarter did.
How does simply seeing someone often build liking?
Psychologist Robert Zajonc described the mere exposure effect in a 1968 paper. In his experiments, people rated nonsense words and unfamiliar symbols more positively the more often they had seen them. Later work found the effect appears even when the exposure is too brief to notice consciously. In a 1992 classroom study by Richard Moreland and Scott Beach, women who attended more class sessions were rated as more likable by raters who had only seen photographs of them.
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