How to Get Other People to Like You

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“How should one behave if one’s goal is to be liked?”

This question was posed by psychologists Michael Dufner and Sascha Krause in the first sentence of a recent article in the journal Psychological Science.

It is a question that we have all asked ourselves at one time or another. Even if you are not a person who desperately craves affirmation and liking from other people most of the time, you have found yourself in situations with a potential romantic partner, a prospective employer, or someone else who was important to you, where making a good first impression mattered a great deal.

And it turns out that we are not always good at judging the impression that we make on others.

The Liking Gap

Researchers have identified something called the liking gap, which is our tendency to underestimate how much other people like us when we first meet them. Studies of the liking gap indicate that the problem stems from our failure to correctly read the verbal and nonverbal signals of liking that other people send our way during our first conversations with them. Such studies typically reveal that individuals who view videotapes of laboratory conversations between strangers more accurately judge the degree of liking that people have for each other than do the conversationalists themselves.

Setting aside the issue of whether we can really tell how much others like us after our first conversation with them, how should we behave in order to make it happen?

The answer to the question depends to some extent upon which type of liking we are after.

There Are Different Types of Liking

Some researchers have made a distinction between popularity and unique liking. Popularity refers to how much we are liked by most people in general, and it is the type of liking commonly associated with status, respect, or admiration. In contrast, unique liking reflects the intensity of positive feelings that we attract from specific individuals with whom we have a close relationship: friends, coworkers, and romantic partners.

Dufner and Krause explored the predictors of both popularity and unique liking in a study where previously unacquainted individuals engaged in a series of five-minute one-on-one conversations with three to five other people. The participants in the study rated their preliminary liking for each of their conversational partners following a brief introduction but before their conversation, and then again following the conversation.

All of the conversations were videotaped, and independent observers watched the interactions and rated the extent to which the individuals in the conversations displayed agentic and communal behaviors toward their partners.

Agentic behaviors are what we expect to see from a person who feels in control of the situation. They reflect feelings of confidence and dominance and may include being a bit boastful and self-assured.

Communal behaviors are less focused on the individual doing the behaving and more focused on their partner in the interaction. Communal behaviors advertise friendliness, warmth, and cooperativeness.

The goal of the data analysis in this study was to determine if different categories of behavior predicted ratings of different types of liking. The results were straightforward: There was no downside to engaging in communal behaviors. More communal behavior was associated with higher scores on both popularity and unique liking.

Agentic behavior, on the other hand, predicted higher popularity ratings but had either no influence or a somewhat negative effect on unique liking.

The take-home advice from the authors of the study was that one should strive to be as communal as possible when meeting new people, but that “it might not be good advice to show a higher than usual level of agentic behavior when trying to win a new friend.”

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