Your friends like you more than you think
Your small kindnesses land harder than you expect, too.
TED Talks Daily · Sunday Pick: Do all my friends secretly hate me? | from Corner PieceYour friends probably like you more than you think they do. Marisa G. Franco, a friendship expert, calls the blind spot under-sociality: we "underestimate how much people like us," and how much they value our small kindnesses.
Melissa Fernandes, who was getting over a painful breakup with a friend she had known for 20 years, put the fear bluntly. She asked, "am I the only one who is looking out for me and are all the other people in my life secretly hating me?"
Franco says that fear is usually wrong: "Our felt experience of being loved is very different from the reality of how loved we are." People on the receiving end of kindness, she says, feel that "this is so meaningful to me."
How do you open up if you think people do not even like you? Operating from that kind of fear can make it hard to genuinely connect.
Questions people ask
Is this just about close friends, or strangers too?
It shows up with strangers too. In conversation studies by Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom, and colleagues, people consistently predicted they were liked less than they actually were. Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found the same underestimation for thank-you notes, and Xuan Zhao and Epley found it for compliments.
Why do our brains get this so wrong?
We focus on ourselves, not the other person. After we reach out, we replay how awkward we sounded and assume they noticed it as much as we did. They are usually focused on the kindness itself, not our performance.
What is a low-risk way to test it?
Send a short check-in text to someone you have not talked to in a while, with no big ask. Researchers find that the sender worries about bothering the receiver, while the receiver mostly feels pleased and touched. Keep it brief, warm, and specific.