Have you ever been introduced to someone – a friend of a friend at a party, perhaps, or someone in your industry at a work event – and walked away from the interaction cursing yourself? Me too. If you’re not in the right headspace, meeting new people can be anxiety-inducing, and it’s all too easy to convince yourself that you made a terrible first impression.

But according to new research, we should all be kinder to ourselves – because we generally make a better first impression than we think. Psychologists at Cornell, Harvard and Yale Universities in the US and the University of Essex in the UK have found that after we have conversations with new people, they generally like us and enjoy our company more than we assume.

This discrepancy between what people really think of us and what we think they think of us is called a “liking gap”, the researchers said, and it can hold us back from developing positive new relationships.

“Our research suggests that accurately estimating how much a new conversation partner likes us – even though this a fundamental part of social life and something we have ample practice with – is a much more difficult task than we imagine,” explain first authors Erica Boothby of Cornell and Gus Cooney of Harvard.

Over the course of five studies, Boothby, Cooney and their co-authors Professor Margaret Clark and Professor Gillian M Sandstrom investigated five different aspects of the liking gap. Their findings were published recently in the journal Psychological Science.

How the “liking gap” could be holding us back from making new friendships