Want to know how to get people to like you more? You’re in good company.
Most of us have walked away from a chat replaying every word. Did that joke land? Did I talk too much? Why did I mention the cat? It feels like a private worry, but it’s a very common one, and it sits on top of a bigger problem. In June 2025 the WHO Commission on Social Connection reported that 1 in 6 people worldwide is affected by loneliness, a pattern it links to more than 871,000 deaths a year. Its co-chair, former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, called loneliness “a defining challenge of our time.”
So being likeable isn’t a vanity project. It’s how friendships start, and how a new city stops feeling like a waiting room.
The good news? You don’t need to become a different person. Most of what makes people warm to you is small, learnable and a little counterintuitive. Below are 24 habits, each backed by research you can check, and each ending with something concrete to do. If you want the wider toolkit afterwards, our guide on how to improve your social skills is a good next stop.
1. Assume they like you more than you think
Start with the belief that quietly sabotages everything else.
After a conversation, people almost always guess that the other person liked them less than they actually did. Psychologists call it the liking gap, first documented by Erica Boothby and colleagues in Psychological Science in 2018. Strangers, new dorm roommates and workshop participants all showed it, and for roommates it lasted for months.
Newer work suggests the screen doesn’t fix it. In the 2025 “liking gap online” experiments by Vanessa Oviedo, Andrew Guydish and Jean Fox Tree, published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, pairs of UC Santa Cruz students talked over text, audio or video. In the second experiment, people rated how much they liked their partner at about 4.3 out of 5, but guessed their partner liked them at only about 3.5. The gap appeared in every format. These were students from one campus, so treat it as one more confirmation rather than the final word.
Why does this matter? Because if you think you’re not liked, you hold back. You ask fewer questions, leave earlier and don’t follow up. And that makes the guess come true.
Next time, do this: after a chat, write down one sign the other person enjoyed it (a laugh, a follow-up question, a “we should do this again”). Then act as if that sign is the real data, because it probably is. If self-doubt runs deeper than one conversation, learning to stop underestimating yourself helps with the root.
2. Smile like you mean it
A real smile is still the cheapest signal of goodwill you’ve got. What’s new is how measurable its effect has become.
In July 2025, Dimosthenis Stefanidis and colleagues published a set of studies in Scientific Reports on entrepreneurs pitching to investors. Across 1,091 Shark Tank pitches, founders who smiled had better odds of getting funded, and perceived trustworthiness explained part of that link. In a controlled experiment with 51 venture capitalists, smiling founders were judged to have a 16.6% higher chance of a successful exit and were valued about $2.1 million higher than non-smiling ones.
Obvious caveat: investors judging pitches aren’t your neighbours judging you over the fence. But the mechanism is general. A smile reads as “I’m safe to deal with,” and trust is the doorway to liking.
The trick is the genuine kind, the one that reaches your eyes. You can’t fake that on command, but you can give yourself a reason for it: think of something you actually like about the person in front of you right before you say hello. For more on this kind of easy warmth, see our piece on how to be charming.
3. Ask the second question
Plenty of advice tells you to “ask questions.” Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks has a sharper version.
In her January 2025 book Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, Brooks describes analysing 15-minute get-to-know-you conversations among 398 strangers. Her team sorted the questions into types: introductory ones (“How are you?”), mirror ones (bouncing the same question back), topic switches and follow-ups. Her point is blunt. The likeability boost from asking more questions came almost entirely from the follow-ups.
That matches her earlier lab work. Karen Huang, Brooks and colleagues (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2017) found that people who asked more questions were better liked, and in speed-dating data, daters who asked more follow-ups got more agreements to a second date. The reason is responsiveness. A follow-up proves you heard the last answer and want more of it.
Give it a go: in your next conversation, ask one question, then ask two more that grow out of the answer. “Wait, how did you end up there?” counts. So does “What was the hardest part?” Our guide to having a good conversation with anyone has more prompts.
4. Put your phone out of sight
Your phone on the table is louder than you think.
A May 2025 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology by Nie Ni and colleagues pooled 52 studies (58 samples, 19,698 people) on “partner phubbing,” ignoring a partner in favour of a phone. The pattern was consistent. More phubbing went with worse relationships on almost every measure the authors tracked.
| Outcome linked to partner phubbing | Pooled correlation |
|---|---|
| Relationship satisfaction (30 samples, 9,040 people) | −0.22 |
| Intimacy quality | −0.27 |
| Partner responsiveness | −0.29 |
| Conflict | +0.57 |
Two honest limits. Most of the underlying studies are cross-sectional, so they can’t prove the phone causes the damage rather than unhappy couples reaching for their phones. And the research is about romantic partners, not new acquaintances. Still, the 2025 phubbing meta-analysis describes the same thing any friend notices: attention that keeps drifting to a screen reads as “you’re not that interesting.”
Test it this week: when you sit down with someone, put the phone face down in a bag or pocket, not on the table. If the habit has a stronger grip than that, our steps to stop doomscrolling can loosen it.
5. Listen until they feel heard
Being quiet isn’t the same as listening. People can tell the difference.
The biggest evidence base here comes from work settings. Avraham Kluger and colleagues’ registered meta-analysis in the Journal of Business and Psychology (April 2024 issue) pulled together 664 effect sizes and more than 400,000 observations. Feeling listened to was linked to better work outcomes overall (r = .39), and the strongest link was with relationship quality (r = .51). There’s a catch the authors flag themselves: about three quarters of the data relied on self-reports, so some of that overlap is people who like a colleague also rating them as a good listener.
What does “high-quality” listening look like in practice? Guy Itzchakov, who runs the Interpersonal Listening and Social Influence Lab at the University of Haifa, described it in a November 2025 talk at Michigan Ross’s Center for Positive Organizations as focused attention, accurate understanding and a non-judgmental intent. Notice what’s missing from that list: advice, fixing and jumping in with your own story.
Next time someone tells you about a problem, paraphrase it back before you say anything else (“So the worst part is that nobody warned you?”) and only offer a solution if they ask. Our guide to showing empathy to someone goes deeper on this.
6. Introduce yourself, and use their name
This one comes from a hospital bed.
In August 2013, Dr Kate Granger, a young elderly-care doctor with terminal cancer, was in hospital with post-operative sepsis. She noticed that many of the staff caring for her never told her their names. So she started a Twitter campaign, #hellomynameis, asking NHS staff to introduce themselves to every patient. By February 2015 the BMJ reported that more than 80 NHS organisations and over 400,000 staff, from consultants to porters, had signed up. Hospitals issued #hellomynameis badges and built the habit into staff induction. Granger died in July 2016, aged 34, and the campaign became her legacy.
What the case shows is scale and adoption, not a controlled trial. Nobody measured whether patients “liked” staff more. But Granger’s own account is the useful part: staff who skipped the introduction left her feeling treated as a condition rather than a person. A name and a hello reverse that, in a hospital or anywhere else.
Your move: introduce yourself first, even when it feels slightly formal, and use the other person’s name once early in the conversation and once when you say goodbye. Not ten times. Twice.
7. Go past small talk sooner
Small talk is a fine on-ramp. The mistake is never leaving it.
Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley ran 12 experiments with more than 1,800 participants, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2022. Pairs of mostly strangers discussed either shallow questions or deeper ones, such as a time they’d cried in front of someone. Both kinds of conversation went better than people predicted. The gap was biggest for the deep ones: people overestimated the awkwardness and underestimated how connected they’d feel. When participants had one of each, many expected to prefer the shallow chat and ended up preferring the deep one.
Not every comparison in the paper was statistically clear, and these were consenting volunteers who knew what they’d signed up for. So don’t open with someone’s childhood trauma at a bus stop.
A quick experiment: after the usual “what do you do,” ask one question with a little more weight. “What’s been the best part of your year so far?” works almost anywhere. If you need a solid base first, here’s our guide on how to be good at small talk.
8. Say the compliment out loud
You think nice things about people all day. Most of them stay in your head.
Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley tested why across nine experiments (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021). People wrote real compliments for others, then predicted how the recipient would react. They consistently underestimated how good the compliment would make the other person feel and overestimated how awkward it would be. Part of the reason was that givers fixated on whether they’d phrase it well, while recipients mostly registered the warmth. Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bohns found the same miscalibration that year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
So the barrier is usually you, not them.
Make it specific and about something the person chose or did. “That question you asked in the meeting changed the whole discussion” beats “nice shirt.” Start small: give one specific compliment today that you would normally have kept to yourself.
9. Be the one who reaches out
Thinking of an old friend and not texting them is one of the most common social hesitations there is. It’s also one of the most misjudged.
Peggy Liu, SoYon Rim, Lauren Min and Kate Min ran 13 experiments with more than 5,900 participants (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, April 2023). Some people sent a short note or small gift to someone in their social circle; others received one. Across the board, senders underestimated how much the gesture would be appreciated. The underestimation got bigger when the message came out of the blue and when the two people weren’t especially close.
The likely reason: recipients focus on the pleasant surprise of being thought of, and senders barely factor that in. The authors studied people with a history of positive contact, so this isn’t evidence that a cold message to an ex will go well.
Pick one person you’ve been meaning to contact and send three lines today. No agenda, no “sorry it’s been so long” paragraph. Just “Saw this and thought of you. How are you doing?”
10. Mirror lightly, not like a mime
You’ve probably heard that copying someone’s posture makes them like you. It can, but the reason matters, because it tells you where the trick breaks.
Here is the mechanism as researchers now describe it. When someone subtly matches your body language, you read it as a sign that they’re like you. Perceived similarity, in turn, makes people more likeable. Bretter, Hardin and Robinson tested this chain in two experiments (159 and 144 participants) in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology in August 2024. Mimicked participants rated the mimicker as more likeable, and that effect ran through how personally similar they felt to them.
Now the break point. If mimicry works by signalling “we’re alike,” it fails the moment it’s noticed, because then it signals “I’m running a technique on you.” Janet Wessler and colleagues showed exactly that in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior (2023): subtle mimicry increased liking, strong mimicry hurt it, and when participants became aware of being mimicked, liking and trust dropped. The broader mimicry literature has also had replication trouble, so this is a modest effect, not a magic switch.
Here’s a simple way in: forget copying gestures. Match the other person’s energy and pace instead. If they’re speaking slowly and quietly, don’t bounce in like a game-show host.
11. Ask for advice on their turf
Many people avoid asking for advice because they worry it makes them look clueless. The research says that worry is mostly misplaced, with conditions attached.
Alison Wood Brooks, Francesca Gino and Maurice Schweitzer ran a series of studies published in Management Science in 2015. People who were asked for advice rated the asker as more competent, not less. The effect held when the task was hard (asking about something trivial didn’t help), when the request went to them personally and when it fell within their expertise. Asking someone about a topic they plainly knew nothing about backfired.
The likely reason is flattery of the useful kind. Being asked tells the adviser “I think you know this,” and people warm to those who recognise their competence. This is a work-context finding about perceived competence, not a long-term study of friendship.
Ask a colleague or neighbour for advice on one genuinely tricky thing they’re known to be good at, then tell them later how it turned out. The follow-up is where the relationship actually grows.
12. Let people help you
Close cousin of the last tip, with an even bigger blind spot.
In six experiments with 2,118 adults in the United States, Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley (Psychological Science, 2022) compared what help-seekers expected with what helpers actually felt. In one study, 50 visitors to a public park asked strangers to take their photo with a Polaroid camera. People who needed help consistently underestimated how willing others would be, underestimated how good helpers would feel and overestimated how inconvenienced they’d be. The authors’ explanation: we assume people help out of obligation, when a lot of them help because it feels good.
Picture this: you’re new at work and the shared printer jams. You can spend twenty minutes wrestling it alone, or ask the person next to you. Asking feels like a small imposition. For them, it’s often a two-minute chance to be useful and the start of a “remember when” between you.
Tonight, if you can: think of one small, specific thing someone could help you with this week, and ask. Keep it concrete and easy to say yes to.
13. Thank people in writing
Gratitude is the compliment’s quieter sibling, and it’s undervalued for the same reason.
Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley (Psychological Science, June 2018) had people write short letters of thanks to someone who had mattered to them. In the first experiment, 107 MBA students wrote letters and predicted the recipient’s reaction. The writers underestimated how positive recipients would feel and how surprised they’d be by what the letter said, and they overestimated how awkward it would be. Recipients, it turned out, often had no idea how much their help had meant.
Writers worried about sounding clumsy. Recipients cared about the warmth.
Send a short message to someone who helped you, at any point, and name exactly what they did and what difference it made. Three sentences is enough. The specificity is what makes it land.
14. Skip the humblebrag
“Ugh, so exhausted from flying back and forth for all these speaking gigs.” You know the type. It doesn’t work.
Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino and Michael Norton tested humblebragging across nine studies, including a diary study and a field experiment (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, January 2018). In one social-media study, the more people humblebragged, the less they were liked (r = −.34). Overall, humblebrags did worse than plain bragging on liking, perceived competence and even how much money people were willing to give the humblebragger. Complaint-style humblebrags were the worst of all, losing even to honest complaining.
The cause is sincerity. People see through the disguise and conclude you’re both boastful and fake.
Next time, do this: if you’re proud of something, say it plainly (“I got the promotion, and I’m really pleased”) or don’t say it at all. And if constant comparison is what’s pushing you to slip wins into conversations, our tips to stop comparing yourself to others may help.
15. Let them see a bit of the mess
Admitting a mistake or saying “I’m not sure I can do this” feels risky from the inside. From the outside, it often looks like courage.
Anna Bruk and colleagues at the University of Mannheim called this the “beautiful mess effect” in a 2018 set of six experiments. Across situations such as admitting a mistake or asking for help, people judged their own displays of vulnerability more harshly than they judged the same displays in others. A 2022 follow-up in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that self-compassion shrank that gap.
There’s a limit worth respecting. The studies looked at single moments of vulnerability, so they can’t tell you how it lands when you unload on the same people every day. Openness works best as an occasional, honest moment, not a running commentary.
When you’ve got something wrong, say so early and simply: “That was my mistake, here’s how I’ll fix it.” One clean admission tends to do more for your likeability than a week of looking flawless.
16. Invest the hours
Likeability gets you in the door. Time is what turns liking into friendship.
Communication researcher Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas surveyed 355 adults who had moved in the previous six months and were looking for new friends, then tracked 112 first-year university students (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2019). Combining both studies, he estimated it takes roughly 40 to 60 hours together to become casual friends, 80 to 100 hours to become friends and more than 200 hours to become good friends. Hours spent working together counted for less than time spent hanging out.
Two hundred hours sounds like a lot. Spread over a year, it’s about four hours a week. Hall’s own summary is refreshingly practical: “You can’t make people spend time with you, but you can invite them.”
Book it now: pick one acquaintance you’d like to know better and suggest something specific with a day attached. “Coffee on Thursday?” works far better than “we should hang out sometime.”
17. Join something that meets regularly
You don’t have to manufacture every connection from scratch. Shared, repeated settings do half the work.
The WHO Commission on Social Connection’s June 2025 report argues that solutions to loneliness sit at three levels: national, community and individual. On the community side, it points to social infrastructure such as parks, libraries and cafés. On the individual side, its list of everyday steps is strikingly modest: reaching out to a friend in need, putting your phone away to be fully present, greeting a neighbour, joining a local group and volunteering.
Why do groups work so well? They supply the two ingredients from the last tip, repeated contact and shared activity, without anyone having to send an awkward invitation. You turn up, the same faces turn up, and familiarity builds itself.
Say you join a Tuesday running club. Week one, you’re the new person. By week six, someone saves you a spot at the stretch and asks how your knee is. Nothing dramatic happened. You just kept showing up.
Your move: find one group that meets at least every other week (a class, a volunteering shift, a choir, a five-a-side team) and commit to the first four sessions before you decide whether it’s for you.
18. Lead with warmth, then show what you can do
Think of meeting someone as walking up to a house. Before you care how nice the furniture is, you check whether the door is open.
That’s roughly how social psychologists Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy and Peter Glick describe first impressions. Their work, profiled in Harvard Magazine in 2010, holds that people judge others on two broad dimensions: warmth (is this person on my side?) and competence (can they act on it?). Warmth is judged first and carries more weight in the overall impression. Cuddy also noted a twist: when people think about themselves, they tend to value their own competence over their warmth. So we lead with the furniture and wonder why nobody comes in.
The analogy holds for order: openness gets checked before ability. It breaks down when competence is the whole point. If you’re choosing a surgeon, you’ll take the brilliant, slightly cold one. And people revise first impressions over time; the door can open later.
In your next meeting with someone new, spend the first two minutes on them (a question, a smile, a bit of interest) before you get to your credentials. Our guide to improving your emotional intelligence helps with reading when someone needs warmth more than expertise.
19. Use humour that includes people
Funny people get liked. But the mechanism is narrower than “be funny.”
Alexandra Lynn Frank and colleagues at the University of Georgia tested humour in science communication (Journal of Science Communication, March 2025). Participants saw one of several versions of a fictional scientist’s social-media post about artificial intelligence, with no humour, gentle anthropomorphic humour, satire or a mix. What predicted liking was mirth, the actual feeling of amusement in the audience. People who were more amused liked the scientist more. Harsh satire, the authors note, can undermine credibility.
It’s one online experiment with fictional posts, so don’t overread it. The useful idea is that likeability comes from the other person enjoying themselves, not from your joke count.
A quick experiment: for one day, swap put-down humour for observational humour about shared situations (the endless meeting, the weather, the broken coffee machine). Notice who laughs with you. If humour doesn’t come naturally, our guide on how to have a good sense of humor has gentle ways in.
20. Do small kind things for no reason
Kindness seems too obvious to need research. The research is about why we do so little of it.
Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley ran several experiments with around 1,000 participants in total (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2023). People performed small acts of kindness, sometimes for friends and sometimes for strangers. In one, visitors to an ice rink on a cold day could give a cup of hot chocolate to a stranger. Recipients consistently felt better than the givers predicted and rated the gesture as “bigger” than the givers did. The extra pleasure wasn’t just surprise: it didn’t appear when people simply received something unexpected without the kindness attached.
The givers focused on the object. The recipients focused on the warmth behind it.
Give it a go: do one small, unasked-for thing this week, like bringing a colleague their usual coffee, returning a borrowed book with a note or holding the lift. For a longer list of ideas, see how to be friendly and kind.
21. Disagree without making it a contest
You can’t agree with everyone. You can disagree in a way that makes people want to keep talking to you.
Michael Yeomans, Julia Minson and colleagues studied what they call conversational receptiveness, language that shows you’re genuinely engaging with an opposing view (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, September 2020). Government executives whose language was more receptive were rated as better teammates and advisers by their partners, though not by themselves. On Wikipedia, editors who wrote more receptive posts received fewer personal attacks from people who disagreed. And people trained in a simple “receptiveness recipe” were seen as more desirable collaborators.
The recipe is learnable: acknowledge the other view (“I understand why you’d see it that way”), frame your opinion as yours (“I think” rather than “the fact is”) and hedge where honest (“sometimes,” “in my experience”).
Here’s a simple way in: in your next disagreement, say back the other person’s point in one fair sentence before you make your own. If tense conversations rattle you, our tips on being tolerant of other people’s opinions are worth a read.
22. Know when to wrap up
Leaving well is part of being liked. Most of us don’t know when that is.
Adam Mastroianni and colleagues asked people in 932 conversations, some between close partners and some between strangers, when they had wanted the conversation to end (PNAS, March 2021). Only about 2% ended when both people wanted them to, and only about 30% ended when even one did. On average, the gap between actual and desired length was roughly half the conversation. People also had little idea when their partner wanted to stop, because everyone politely hides that signal.
The practical upshot isn’t “always leave early.” Some people wanted more time, not less. It’s that you can’t read the clock off the other person’s face, so give them an easy exit and end on a warm note. Picture leaving a party while the music’s still good: people remember the high point, not the slow fade.
When a chat hits a natural lull, close it kindly and with a reason to continue: “I’ve loved this. Let’s pick it up next week?”
23. Find real common ground
People like people who seem like them. The interesting part is which “seem” matters.
Matthew Montoya, Robert Horton and Jeffrey Kirchner’s meta-analysis in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (2008) combined 460 effect sizes from 313 studies. Both actual similarity and perceived similarity were strongly linked to attraction (r = .47 and r = .39). But in existing relationships, actual similarity stopped predicting attraction, while perceived similarity kept doing so. In other words, once you know someone, what counts is whether you feel alike, which is something you can actively discover.
This is an older study, kept here because it’s the most comprehensive synthesis on the question. Its message is simple: you don’t need identical tastes, you need to notice and name the overlap you do have.
Start small: in your next conversation, look for one genuine point in common (a hometown, a frustration, a weirdly specific love of bad sci-fi) and say it out loud. “No way, me too” is a powerful sentence. It also helps to get curious about where you differ, as in our guide to seeing things from different points of view.
24. Like them first
The last tip loops back to the first. If people underestimate how much they’re liked, someone has to go first.
The reciprocity-of-liking effect is one of the sturdiest findings in social psychology, and it has a clear chain of cause and effect. When you learn someone likes you, you infer they mean well and will treat you well (Montoya and Insko set out this link in 2008). Expecting good treatment, you relax, open up and treat them warmly. They pick that up and like you more. Experimental data, as the SAGE encyclopedia entry on reciprocity of liking summarises, support the causal direction: learning that someone likes us makes us like them more, so this is more than a correlation.
One qualification is worth knowing. In a 2011 Psychological Science study by Whitchurch and colleagues, women viewing male students’ profiles were most attracted when they were unsure how much the men liked them, because uncertainty kept them thinking about the men. That’s a romantic-attraction finding, though. In friendship and at work, clear warmth is the safer bet.
Test it this week: walk into one interaction having decided in advance that you like this person, then let it show in the small ways covered above. Listen, follow up, compliment something real. Watch what comes back.
What to do when you slip
You will forget all of this at some point. You’ll check your phone mid-story, monologue about your commute or freeze when someone asks a personal question. That’s normal, and it’s recoverable.
First, the research on habits is on your side. A December 2024 systematic review in Healthcare by Ben Singh and colleagues found that, in studies that measured it, the median time for a new health habit to become automatic was about 59 to 66 days, with individual times ranging from 4 to 335 days. One of the trials it drew on found that missing a single opportunity didn’t materially derail the process. The review covers health behaviours, not social ones, but the lesson transfers: a bad conversation is one missed repetition, not a reset.
Second, remember tip one. The liking gap means you’re probably judging your slip far more harshly than the other person is. They may not have noticed at all.
Third, repair lightly and quickly. “Sorry, I was miles away. Tell me the rest of that?” turns a lapse into proof that you care about what they were saying. If the day itself went badly, our steps to turn a bad day around can help you reset before the next conversation.
Then pick one tip from this list and practise only that one for a week. Not all 24.
Final thoughts
Put the research together and a pattern shows up. People mostly like those who make them feel noticed, safe and a bit more interesting than they felt before. You don’t need charisma for that. You need curiosity, a phone in your pocket, the nerve to send the text and the patience to keep showing up.
Choose one habit, the one that made you wince a little, and try it in your next three conversations. Then come back for the next one.
Want more on friendships, partners and the people you work with? Browse our Relationships section.
