Evaluating the psychological and social nature of actual and perceived liking gaps.

Abstract

Our beliefs about how much we are liked tend to be less positive than liking judgments of others, a finding termed the "liking gap." Because much of the past work has studied liking gaps at the sample level, it has overlooked important nuances in how these gaps can be measured and experienced. We introduce a distinction between the actual liking gap (i.e., a between-person discrepancy between how much others actually like us and how much we think others like us) and the perceived liking gap (i.e., a within-person discrepancy between how much we like others and how much we think others like us). Across three large first-impression samples (N_total = 2,753), we use condition-based regression analyses to examine (a) who tends to exhibit these gaps, and (b) how people experience social interactions marked by gaps. Our findings suggest that people display two types of gaps, actual and perceived, that are psychologically distinct. Larger negative perceived liking gaps were related to indicators of insecurity (i.e., lower self-esteem, higher social anxiety, and higher neuroticism), whereas actual gaps did not show the same pattern. Neither gap was reliably associated with the quality of people's social interaction. Finally, our approach also allowed us to isolate the unique effect of feeling liked as a robust, consistent correlate of both psychological adjustment and interaction quality. Overall, this research offers new insights into the (mal)adaptiveness of two types of liking gaps. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).