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Jul 26, 2023

People Like You More Than You Think They Do—But Does That Even Matter?

By Daisy Jones I was at a garden party the other night, eating a folded zucchini

By Daisy Jones

I was at a garden party the other night, eating a folded zucchini passed to me via a little cocktail stick, when I suddenly ran out of things to say. It wasn't the first time this had happened that week. A previous night I’d been in the smoking area of a music venue with people that I know and like when my ability to construct a flowing conversation seemed to mysteriously dry up. You’re being really boring, said a mean voice inside my head. Stop being so boring. And then later, in bed, the voice piped up again: Why were you so boring earlier?

Like plenty of others, I’m often overcome by waves of social anxiety, which can cause me to act in strange ways and then ruminate on (read: obsess about) my behavior later. However, I’m also grown-up enough to realize that these are just passing thoughts and rarely based in reality. It is fundamentally impossible to get an objective picture of everyone's opinion of you. Which brings me neatly to "the liking gap," an idea that has been doing the rounds on TikTok, and which basically refers to the gulf between how much you think people like you (not at all) and how much they actually do (more than you think!).

The concept is based on a 2018 academic study, which found that, in nearly all of our social interactions, we tend to systematically underestimate how much others like us. The study followed several situations in which people got to know each other—strangers in laboratories, first-year college students in dorm rooms, members of the public in a workshop—and then asked everyone to rank how much they liked another person and how much that other person liked them. Nobody's numbers matched up—everyone's "perceived liking" numbers were a lot lower than how much they were actually liked. And therein lies… the liking gap.

The liking gap is obviously great news for the paranoid among us. Turns out that your friends probably don't secretly hate you because of that time you laughed weirdly at a house party, or didn't have the right opinion about a current event. Still, something about the liking gap doesn't quite gel with me. Not because I don't think it's true—it's based on an academic study, after all—but because I wonder whether it's actually helpful to think about how much others do or don't like us at all. Being preoccupied with others’ perceptions, in whatever direction, is exhausting. As the saying goes: "What others think of me is none of my business."

In my teens, and even my early 20s, I genuinely didn't care what others thought of me. Of course I wanted to be liked—who doesn't—but it didn't consume my thoughts for longer than, like, three seconds. I befriended people blindly, assuming that if they didn't get me then they simply wouldn't hang out with me. This attitude made me aware of an odd paradox: the less you care, the easier your social life will become. People tend to relax around relaxed people, and everyone likes to feel relaxed. Thinking about what others think of you isn't just annoying, then, but it also actively holds you back.

Eventually I developed insecurities, although it's hard to pinpoint when. It could have been after I went through a period of depression at university and lost some of my social ease. It could have been when I started working in media, an industry riddled with perception-based paranoia. Or it could have just been because I got older, with my childlike delusions getting stripped away like old paint. Either way, I was like Eve eating the apple and discovering her own nakedness. And I’ve never fully returned to that state of not caring, of befriending people because I liked being around them without worrying if the reverse were also true.

I’ve been trying to care less, though, and for the most part it's working. The morning after the garden party I thought: Well, so what if you were quiet that day? Who cares what others think? Multiple studies have shown that people tend to mainly think about themselves anyway. They’re not sitting there judging you. They’re too busy judging themselves. Social anxiety is by its nature completely pointless—a waste of energy that may have once had some evolutionary benefits, but which really just keeps us feeling tense when we could be having fun.

The next time I go to a party, I’d really love to just say what I’m thinking as I’m thinking it (within reason, of course). I’d like to laugh when I feel like laughing, and dance to music as and when the mood takes me. I’d like to make friends with people who are interesting, without worrying about whether I’m interesting too. I’d like to have a good time without thinking too much about whether others are having a good time, and what I should be doing about it. I’d like to live my life, because it's mine, nobody else's, and that's what I’m here for. I’d like to be around others who are doing that too. I’d like that for all of us.