Among the strangers paired up to talk in Erica Boothby’s original liking-gap studies, participants systematically underestimated how much their conversation partner liked them. But when the researchers went back and checked which personality traits predicted the size of that gap, only one measure moved the needle, and it wasn’t the one most people would guess.
What the researchers actually tested
Alongside the conversations themselves, participants in the initial two lab studies pairing up strangers also completed measures of four personality traits that seemed like plausible candidates for explaining who underestimates being liked the most: narcissism, shyness, rejection sensitivity, and self-esteem.
Boothby and her co-authors ran a statistical test for each of the four, checking whether it predicted a bigger or smaller gap between how much a participant thought they were liked and how much their partner actually reported liking them.
The one trait that mattered
Only shyness moved the needle, and it moved it in a clean, dose-dependent way: the shyer someone was, the wider the gap between how liked they thought they were and how liked they actually were.
Rejection sensitivity didn’t predict the gap at all. Neither did self-esteem. Neither did narcissism — three traits that, on paper, sound like exactly the kind of thing that should track with underestimating how much people like you, and none of them did. The researchers had also built in a statistical safeguard for testing four traits at once, the kind of correction designed to catch a fluke result before it gets mistaken for a real one.
Shyness passed that test. The other three didn’t even come close.
Why shyness specifically, and not the others
The result lines up with what shyness actually is, as distinct from the traits it gets lumped in with. Low self-esteem is a general negative view of one’s own worth; rejection sensitivity is a heightened alertness to signs of social rejection specifically; narcissism involves an inflated self-view that, if anything, might be expected to shrink the liking gap rather than widen it. Shyness is neither of those — it’s closer to a chronic discomfort in the moment of interacting, paired with a tendency toward self-critical, self-monitoring thought during and after a conversation.
That specific combination — watching yourself closely while assuming the worst about how it’s landing — lines up with the mechanism the broader liking-gap research points to: people miss signs that their partner likes them because they’re too absorbed in their own self-critical read of the interaction to register the signal.
Boothby has described this and related findings as part of a broader family of “social illusions” that distort self-perception in fairly specific, individual ways rather than as a single uniform bias everyone shares equally.
What this means for anyone building an audience through writing rather than conversation
Shy people are, on average, drawn toward exactly the kind of communication a blog or newsletter offers: asynchronous, revisable, and free of the live, unfolding judgment a face-to-face exchange demands in the moment. Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking made the broader case that a culture built for extroverts systematically undervalues introverts’ contributions. The liking-gap data points to something related but distinct: shy people aren’t actually valued less by the people they talk to — they’re just the ones least equipped to see how much they already are.
A shy writer who assumes a lukewarm response to a post, a pitch, or a comment thread is applying the same distorted instrument the study measured directly: not a neutral read of how the interaction went, but a self-critical one, calibrated by a trait that has nothing to do with how the other person actually felt.
The finding also rules out a tempting alternative explanation. It would be easy to assume that anyone anxious about social standing — someone high in rejection sensitivity, or low in self-esteem — would show the same distorted read. They don’t. Only shyness does. Whatever is driving the gap in shy people specifically, it isn’t a general fear of rejection or a general dislike of oneself; it’s something more particular to shyness itself, and it was strong enough to survive statistical correction for testing four traits at once.
