How will I know if you really like me? Assessing the role of appearance, behavior, and reciprocity for metaliking accuracy in initial social encounters.

Authors

Jana Bruns, Eva Bleckmann, Lisa M Niemeyer, Mitja D Back, Steffen Nestler

Published in

Journal of personality and social psychology. Sep 03, 2026. Epub Sep 03, 2026.

Abstract

In first social encounters, people regularly try to figure out whether others like them. When accurate, these metaliking judgments enable individuals to more optimally engage in social interactions. Although previous research shows that people do know how much others like them, little is known about the processes leading to accurate metaliking judgments. In the present, preregistered research, we aimed to close this gap by investigating the role of a metaperceiver's appearance and behavior, others' behavior toward that metaperceiver, and the reciprocity heuristic in forming accurate metaliking judgments. To this end, we used data from a round-robin study, in which N = 144 participants (M_age = 22.91, 67.6% female) took part in two group meetings, where they interacted with unacquainted others. After each participant had given a short self-introduction, participants indicated liking and metaliking for each other participant. In addition, trained raters judged participants' appearance and behavior during the self-introduction. Results showed that people were able to correctly infer how much others generally liked them, but hardly knew how much specific other liked them. Lens model analyses revealed that although one's appearance and behavior were valid cues for being generally liked, metaperceivers did not utilize most of these observable cues to inform their metaliking judgments. However, the assumed reciprocity mediated both individual and dyadic metaliking accuracy. In light of these findings, we discuss the role of self-observed behavior and stable personality characteristics as well as situational and motivational factors, presenting an integrative theoretical framework to explain generalized and dyadic metaliking accuracy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:
42691278
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 04 Sep 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.