It’s probably happened to you: A stranger starts talking to you at a party. In this moment, you’re not nearly as clever or charming as you hoped you’d be, and you struggle to volley with the anecdotes, opinions, and witticisms lobbed your way. At the end of it, you come away thinking, “They totally thought I was a complete idiot.”

But research shows, they probably didn’t. In a phenomenon dubbed the “liking gap,” people consistently tend to like you better than you think they do. All sorts of other “gaps” — or “social prediction errors,” as experts would call them — govern our social lives. We consistently underestimate everything from people’s empathy toward us to how willing they are to help us. These patterns are strongest when we interact with strangers or acquaintances but can persist for many months into a friendship. They permeate relationships with all kinds of people, from classmates to roommates and coworkers. This pessimism about other people’s attitudes towards us also has consequences, like undercutting our own willingness to connect with others.

One particularly stark example of this misjudgement is how likely people think it is that a random stranger would return your dropped wallet to you. This question is often used in surveys as a measure of social trust, says Lara Aknin, a professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University who studies social relationships and happiness. When you take people’s responses and compare them to the results of real-world “wallet drop” studies, where researchers drop or leave wallets in public spaces and observe the rate of return, Aknin says, “Wallets are returned way more than people expect.”

In one of the most well-known wallet drop studies from 2019, researchers followed more than 17,000 “lost” wallets containing various sums of money in 355 cities across 40 countries. They found that “in virtually all countries, citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money” — a result........

© Vox