They Like You More Than You Think

Here’s your latest issue of Influence Anyone—where you get a strategy each week to influence human behavior for good from Howie and the Behavioring Company team.

…

Last week I was in Lausanne, Switzerland for my 15-year IMD reunion.

Fifteen years.

I spent four days surrounded by some of the most talented, driven, generous people I know. Leaders running major organizations across four continents. Founders building things that matter. Consulting partners advising the world's largest companies through their most difficult decisions.

And the thing that struck me most? Everyone wanted to help each other.

No agenda. No scorekeeping. Just genuine, open, warm investment in each other's success.

It reminded me of something I think we forget in the daily grind.

The people around us are rooting for us. The question is whether we let them.

(If you want the deep dive, keep scrolling 👇🏽)

Here's what the research confirms:

You think people like you less than they actually do.

Psychologists call this the liking gap and it quietly costs more professionals their best opportunities than any skill they're missing.

In a 2018 study published in Psychological Science, researcher Erica Boothby and her colleagues had strangers have conversations, then measured two things: how much each person liked the other, and how much each person thought the other liked them.

The result was consistent and striking.

People systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them. Even after warm, positive, flowing conversations.

We walk away thinking: They were just being polite. I wasn't interesting enough. I probably talked too much.

Meanwhile, the other person is thinking: That was a great conversation. I'd love to talk to them again.

Both people leave feeling a little less connected than they could have been.

The liking gap lives in perception, not reality and it costs you connections you never knew you had.

Practical takeaway:

After your next conversation, ask yourself: what's my actual evidence that this person didn't enjoy talking to me?

Usually, there isn't any. You're filling in silence with self-doubt.

Reach out. Follow up. Make the ask. The gap between what you feel and what's real is almost always wider than you think.

As promised, influence in 60 seconds.

Let me tell you about our dinner party in Lausanne.

Forty-five people. A lovely ballroom. Good wine. The kind of conversation that flows easily between laughter and real questions about each other's lives.

At one point, I looked around and realized something.

Everyone here had been through something. A pivot. A setback. A season where things didn't go the way they'd planned.

And every single person was willing to talk about it. Willing to make an introduction. Offer a connection. Advocate for someone they believed in.

Nobody was keeping score.

I've thought about all the interactions I’ve had since coming home because I know from both experience and research that one of the biggest barriers to building a strong network has nothing to do with access.

It's self-doubt.

We talk ourselves out of reaching out, out of asking. We assume the other person is too busy, too important, too far along to want to hear from us. We replay the parts of conversations where we stumbled and quietly conclude we made a bad impression.

The liking gap is what's actually happening.

Here's why your brain does this.

When you're in a conversation, your attention is split. Part of you is genuinely engaging with the other person. But another part — a loud, anxious part — is monitoring your own performance. Reviewing your word choices. Noticing the pause that ran a beat too long. Wondering if that story went on too far.

The other person doesn't have access to your inner critic.

They're having their own conversation with their own inner critic.

So while you're cataloguing every misstep, they're experiencing the version of you that showed up — your curiosity, your warmth, your genuine interest in them. That's what registers. That's what they remember.

Researchers believe this asymmetry is a core reason the liking gap persists. We have full access to our own anxiety. We have zero access to how others actually experienced us. So we fill that gap with assumption and those assumptions almost always skew negative.

Here's what makes this even more striking.

Boothby and her colleagues found that the liking gap persists even between coworkers who've interacted for months. This isn't just a first-impression problem. We underestimate how liked we are even by people who already like us. Familiarity doesn't close the gap. Action does.

Now add reciprocity.

Robert Cialdini's decades of research on influence identified reciprocity as one of the most powerful forces in human behavior. When someone does something for us — a favor, an introduction, a word to the right person — we feel an almost automatic pull to return it.

This is wired deep into us. Cooperation kept our ancestors alive. The brain treats unreciprocated generosity as a kind of open loop it needs to close.

What this means practically: when you help someone, you're doing more than a good deed. You're building social capital that finds its way back to you. Sometimes immediately, sometimes years later, sometimes from a completely unexpected direction.

The people I reconnected with in Lausanne weren't consciously calculating returns. But reciprocity was working quietly in the background, reinforcing bonds built on decades of genuine investment in each other.

Your network works the same way.

Three shifts to close the gap:

1. Follow up more than feels comfortable. The number of times you reach out that feels like "too much" is probably just right. Most people are genuinely glad to hear from you. “Hey I saw this and I thought of you…”

2. Give before you need anything (and maybe you never will, and that’s ok). Reciprocity flows from generosity. Make the introduction. Send the article. Add the kind word. Give first, and give often. What comes back usually exceeds what went out and the timing is rarely predictable.

3. After a good conversation, assume the best. Unless you have real, concrete evidence the other person was disengaged, they probably enjoyed talking with you. Act accordingly. Follow up like someone who made a good impression because the research says you probably did. Just remember to be interested and you’ll naturally be interesting.

There's a version of your network that's already there, waiting.

People who think about you warmly. People who'd be glad to hear from you. People who would jump at the chance to help — if you only gave them the opening.

The liking gap is the invisible wall between you and all of it.

The reunion in Lausanne reminded me that the people who build extraordinary careers and lives aren't necessarily more talented or more connected than everyone else.

They just reach out. They show up. They invest in the people around them — and they trust that it comes back.

The research says people like you more than you think.

Start acting like it.

Is there someone you've been meaning to reconnect with but haven't?

Hit reply and tell me who came to mind while reading this and that will prompt you to stay true to your intentions. Reach out! Sometimes all it takes is a nudge.

Alright, people of influence, I’ll see you next Sunday.

Change behavior, change lives 🤘🏽

Howie Chan

Creator of Influence Anyone

​Follow me on LinkedIn

P.S. In the Boothby study, the liking gap persisted even when participants reflected on the conversation afterward. Knowing about the bias didn't fully close it.

Which means awareness alone isn't enough. Action is the only thing that actually works. So reach out, connect, and build that network.