Self-Critical Biases in Meta-Perceptions Distort How People Approach Potential Friends

Americans today report fewer friendships than ever before despite many opportunities for social connection. What prevents people from leveraging these opportunities? Prior work documents a “liking gap,” whereby people underestimate how positively others evaluate them, but this research has focused largely on first encounters with strangers. It remains unclear whether similar biases persist when people consider reaching out to potential friends and what their consequences are. Across four preregistered studies (N = 1,211) with college and community samples, we consistently show that people believe others will judge their invitation attempts more harshly (meta-perception) than they judge others extending identical invitations (other-perception). Notably, we identified a novel three-dimensional structure underlying these perceptions: positive attributes (e.g., friendly, warm) operate as relative, comparison-based biases, whereas negative attributes function as absolute biases comprising two subdimensions—hesitant-negative (e.g., anxious, socially awkward) and assertive-negative (e.g., desperate, creepy). These biased meta-perceptions were stable individual differences, though the magnitude of bias decreased with age. Lastly, people’s meta- and other-perceptions of friendship initiation differentially predicted both short-term social judgments, such as likelihood of initiation and acceptance, and real-world outcomes, such as proactiveness in recent friendships and social network size. Together, these findings challenge the assumption of a unidimensional negative self-bias and demonstrate that biased meta-perceptions in friendship initiation reflect a broader socio-cognitive construal style with important implications for relationship formation across the lifespan.