I moved into a new building at the start of the year. I believe in saying hello to your neighbors when you’re the new one, but I also have some judgment, so I wasn’t going to knock on doors with a plate of fresh-baked cookies.
Instead, I got lucky. My next-door neighbor and I ended up walking to the elevator at the same time, and I started a conversation.
He was perfectly nice. Maybe not as animated as me, but we can’t all be extroverts. We rode down, we got out, we went in different directions, and I said something cheerful about seeing him around.
Then I got about forty feet down the block and started the audit. Did he like me? Was I too much before nine in the morning? Am I the weird new neighbor now? Should I have let him speak more?
Everybody has done a version of this, which is why four psychologists spent five studies on it.
Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark found that after a conversation, people are wrong about how it went, and wrong in the same direction almost every time. They named it the liking gap.
Everybody guessed low
Two strangers were brought into a room at Yale, sat down at a table, and told to talk for five minutes. When the time was up, they were walked to separate rooms and asked two things:
How much did you like that person? And how much do you think they liked you?
The answers came back lopsided. On average, people rated how much they liked their partner higher than they rated how much their partner liked them.
Which can’t be true. Not for everybody at once. If one person likes the other more than they’re liked back, and the other believes exactly the same thing, one of them is mistaken. When it happens across a whole room, everyone is.
The obvious explanation is that some people are hard to read. He was pleasant but reserved; she couldn’t tell what he was thinking, and she filled in the blank badly.
But the conversations had been filmed, and two people who knew nothing about the study watched the tapes and judged how much each person seemed to like the other. They got it right.
So the warmth was there. It was on camera. Somebody watching weeks later could pick it up without difficulty, and the one person who couldn’t was sitting two feet away with the best view in the room.
Sandstrom put it plainly. People miss the positive signals coming at them, which an observer can see perfectly well, because they’re spending the conversation on something else.
That study also measured shyness, and found the shyer someone was, the wider their gap ran. It was thirty-six people, so hold it loosely. But it’s the sort of thing you’d want to be untrue.
The grading happens in private
I know exactly what I was spending it on, because I was doing it while the elevator was still moving.
I told my neighbor about the laundry room, which is a story I’ve told better. There’s a version of it with a decent line at the end, and I’ve delivered that line well before.
That morning I got the setup slightly wrong and rushed the middle, and I heard myself doing it.
He had never heard the good version. He had no idea a good version existed. As far as he knew, a neighbor said something mildly amusing about the machines downstairs, which is a perfectly normal thing to happen.
And he’d gotten into that elevator expecting nothing at all. Maybe braced for it to be a little awkward, the way anyone is when they’re stuck in a small box with someone they’ve never met.
So he was measuring the morning against silence, and I was measuring it against the best conversation I’m capable of. We got out of the same elevator with completely different reports, and only one of us was marking to a curve nobody else could see.
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The gap doesn’t wear off
It would be easy to file all this as a first-impressions problem. Five awkward minutes, no information, a bad guess, sorted out by the third or fourth conversation.
That isn’t what the research found.
Researchers followed a hundred or so first-year students who’d been assigned to share a suite, asking them five times across the year how much they liked their suite mates and how much they thought their suite mates liked them.
September, October, December, February. Every time, they guessed low.
These are people sharing a bathroom. Eating together, hearing each other’s alarms, in and out of each other’s rooms for months on end, and still guessing wrong.
And they weren’t just being polite about it. In the last round, the researchers offered a hundred dollars to whoever guessed most accurately. It changed nothing. They believed what they were saying.
By May the gap had closed, which the researchers put down to months of familiarity, the scramble to sort out next year’s housing, or both. It took an academic year and a deadline.
What I do with that
I’ve had eight months and a handful of elevator rides, so I’m not expecting my neighbor situation to resolve on that schedule.
And I can’t fix it from the inside, which took a while to accept. There’s no amount of replaying the conversation that gets me a more accurate reading of it.
What I can do is stop treating the audit as information.
The so-called “fact” that I reach forty feet down the block isn’t a report on how it went. It’s a report on how closely I was listening to myself, which he has no access to and no opinion about.
Sandstrom has written about what it costs to believe the audit. Somebody avoids the next interaction, so they get less practice, so they feel clumsier, so they decide other people can tell, so they avoid contact a bit more.
Nothing in that loop requires anyone to have been unkind. It runs entirely on a person’s review of themselves.
It runs the other way too. When Sandstrom and her colleagues had people approach a stranger every day for a week, the worry about rejection dropped away, and the confidence climbed.
I still have no idea whether my neighbor liked me, and I’m not going to start knocking on doors with cookies.
But the next time I see him by the elevator, I’m going to assume it went fine. It’s the better bet, and the other assumption has a price.
