What If You Could Know When Someone Secretly Likes You

What If You Could Know When Someone Secretly Likes You? One Monday, you start seeing a glowing pink heart over anyone who secretly likes you. Your dog, obviously. Your mom, obviously. But also the grumpy bus driver, the quiet guy from accounting, and June, the woman by the cafe window you've smiled at every morning for six months. No more guessing who likes you. So what could possibly go wrong? Would you want to know who secretly likes you, or would you rather keep the mystery? Tell us in the comments. 0:00 A heart over June 0:21 What if you could know who secretly likes you? 0:25 The hearts 1:11 The liking gap 1:48 Hearts at work 2:22 Reciprocal liking 2:48 Asking June 3:34 What could go wrong? 4:06 How much, not what kind 4:37 No more mystery 5:31 The mirror 5:59 Liking first 6:57 Back at the cafe Science notes: the power is fiction, the science along the way is real. The liking gap: after conversations with strangers, people consistently underestimated how much their conversation partner liked them and enjoyed their company. In one study, first-year college suitemates kept underestimating each other for months (Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom and Clark, "The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think?", Psychological Science, 2018). Reciprocal liking: people tend to like those who they believe like them (for example, Aronson and Worchel, Psychonomic Science, 1966). Beliefs that come true: when people were led to believe a new partner liked them, they behaved more warmly and the partner ended up liking them more; when they believed the partner disliked them, the opposite happened (Curtis and Miller, "Believing another likes or dislikes you: Behaviors making the beliefs come true", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986). The mere exposure effect: in experiments by Robert Zajonc, people rated faces, made-up words and unfamiliar characters more positively the more often they had seen them (Zajonc, "Attitudinal effects of mere exposure", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968). Uncertainty and attraction: in one experiment, women were most drawn to men when they were unsure how much those men liked them back, and they thought about them more (Whitchurch, Wilson and Gilbert, "He loves me, he loves me not...", Psychological Science, 2011). #whatif #psychology #friendship #animation