Good News for the Socially Anxious: People Like You a Lot More Than You Think They Do, New Research Confirms

People are famously good at overestimating their abilities. Psychologists call this tendency “illusory superiority.” Wits call it the “Lake Wobegon effect” after the famous fictional town where, contrary to mathematical law, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average.”  

Whichever name you prefer, evidence for the effect is ample and wide-ranging. Studies show people generally overestimate everything from their intelligence to their leadership skills to their driving ability. 

This research should nudge us toward greater humility in general. But new science suggests there is one big exception, an area where we tend to seriously underestimate our abilities. And the socially anxious entrepreneurs out there are really going to appreciate it. 

You are more charming than you think you are

While most people might be too confident about their individual performance, many of us are still anxious about one thing — our performance around other people. As deeply social animals, we are often hyperaware of how we come off socially. After we meet someone, we replay every word, consider every nuance of body language, and fret about the impression we made. In short, we spend a lot of time worrying that people don’t like us. 

But an accumulating body of cheerful research has good news for those who agonize over their every social interaction (or just have garden-variety worries about their popularity and charm): It turns out social skills are the big exception to the Lake Wobegon effect. You are probably way more charming than you think you are. 

I first covered this bit of scientific good news back in 2018 when a team out of Yale, Harvard, and the University of Essex herded volunteers into meet-and-greet events for a research project. After study subjects mingled and chatted, the scientists asked them to rate other partygoers’ likability and also guess how other attendees had rated them. 

The results, published in Psychological Science, showed that “when meeting for the first time people fail to see signals that other people like them. Both participants in conversations believe they like the other more than the other likes them,” Yale News reported. 

We overanalyze social interactions and self-protectively assume the worst, which leads us to significantly underestimate how much others like us. 

It’s not just first impressions

But that’s just one study, you might object. If so, then I point you to a new Harvard Business Review article from a team of five researchers from Wharton and other institutions. This article sums up not one study, but a whole decade’s worth of research and comes to an equally clear conclusion: You should chill out a little, because chances are excellent you’re more likable than you think you are. 

And not just when it comes to first impressions. 

“People systematically underestimate how much their conversation partners like them and enjoy their company — an illusion we call the ‘liking gap,'” write the researchers. This liking gap, they found, “can linger and permeate a variety of relationships, including interactions with co-workers, persisting long after the initial conversations have taken place. For example, in one of our studies, teammates who had worked together for six months still showed a liking gap.” 

How to close the liking gap

The article contains pairs of comments in which one person describes the impression they think they made — “I probably seemed overeager” — and their conversation partner’s actual assessment — “She seems like a really cool person.” The space between the two is kind of heartbreaking. If you tend toward social anxiety, reading a few comments might be the shock therapy you need to quiet your own inner critic. 

But that’s not the only approach to battling excess social anxiety the researchers offer. They also endorse a technique long championed by both actors and speaking coaches: Focus less on yourself and more on other people. 

“Try to zoom in on your conversation partner, be genuinely curious about them, ask them more questions, and really listen to their answers. The more you’re zeroed in on the other person, and the less you’re focused on yourself, the better your conversation will be and the less your mind will turn to all the things you think you didn’t do well,” they advise. 

If you observe other people closely, as they recommend, you’ll probably notice they are just as nervous and unsure as you are. That’s because science is crystal clear that the one thing people tend to underestimate about themselves is their own ability to charm.