Because You Know They Like Me So: Examining the Accuracy of Dyadic and Triadic Meta-Liking Judgments in Initial Social Encounters

Knowing who likes whom is essential for predicting others’ behavior and navigating social interactions. We examined whether people can accurately assess whether other people like each other and which cognitive heuristics underlie these triadic meta-liking perceptions, replicating previous results by Kenny et al. (1996). In a generalized round-robin study, unacquainted participants ( N = 403, 74.3% female, M age = 23.3) interacted and judged how much they liked others, were liked by others, and believed others liked each other. Analyses using the Triadic Social Relations Model revealed that judges somewhat agreed on who is liked and who likes whom, had some insight into who is generally liked and who likes whom, and relied on perceived reciprocity and assumed agreement, which were partially true. Beyond this, others were more accurate about how much one is liked, while one’s own and others’ perceptions about how much one is liked aligned to a certain degree.