The Prediction Accuracy of Enjoyment is Influenced by a History of Peer Victimization

Poster Session A - Saturday, April 13, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Isabel Leiva¹, Samantha Reisman², Chelsea Helion¹, Vishnu P. Murty¹, Johanna M. Jarcho¹; ¹Temple University, ²Brown University

We often underestimate how much our conversation partners enjoy initial interactions - a phenomenon known as the liking gap. It is unclear what features of a conversation, or prior social experiences of the people involved in it, influence the liking gap. To test this, 23 gender-matched dyads (46 female) who varied in exposure to peer victimization completed a conversation that included three randomly ordered positive, neutral, and negatively-valanced prompts (nine total) about their opinions and experiences. Following the conversation, participants rated their own enjoyment and predicted their partner’s enjoyment, both for the overall conversation, and for individual prompts. Consistent with the liking gap, participants underestimated their partner’s overall enjoyment (Mactual = 6.3; Mpredicted = 5.5; SDboth = 0.9; t = -5.642; p < 0.001) as well as enjoyment for most individual questions (t’s > 2.505; p’s <.01). Conversational features such as prompt order (i.e., primacy and recency effects) and valence did not predict the overall liking gap. However, more severe peer victimization was associated with a larger liking gap (t = -2.724; r = -.38; p <.01). Unpacking this finding in further detail, while we found there was no relation between peer victimization and participant’s own enjoyment (t = -0.556; r = -.08), more severe peer victimization was associated with more negative predictions about one’s partner (t = -2.621; r = -.37; p <.05). This suggests the liking gap is susceptible to individual differences in prior social experiences, and that these social experiences largely influence predictions about peer enjoyment.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions