Here are a few hacks you may have heard to help you be more likable: in conversation, subtly mirror other people’s body language, ask lots of questions, pay attention, use first names more, ask people for favors, be extroverted.
Some of these are just good common sense, but others seem a little silly in their obviousness – and not all are grounded in science. Plus there’s the question of causality. For example, does mirroring cause people to like each other more, or do people who like each other more tend to mirror each other?
Regardless, it’s clear that being liked is core to some of our most central fears. We want to feel like we belong and are accepted. But “likability” is hardly an objective measure. It’s a vague idea at best, mired in all sorts of gendered, racialized and political connotations. In a society still full of myriad disparities, likability is a trait we demand of some people – women and people of color – more than others. And the effort to meet those expectations of likability can be taxing and unfruitful.
What is likability?
By definition, being likable means having qualities that make you a pleasant and largely agreeable person, says Nedra Glover Tawwab, a therapist and author based in North Carolina. “And there are some personality traits that might overlap with likability, like being agreeable and being able to go with the flow.” Humor, self-awareness and conscientiousness when interacting with others are also related.
Likability is intuitive to understand, but researching exactly what it is can be difficult, says Chujun Lin, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Measuring it is tricky, and researchers tend to use a couple of different methods. You could survey people and get them to rate how much they like a person, Lin says, but “people don’t always tell the truth.” Plus a number rating is a bit abstract. Or you could experimentally simulate a real-world setting by presenting participants with two people and asking who they’d rather talk to, she says. But is that really measuring how likable someone is?
So many different qualities – like warmth, approachability, popularity, extroversion and trustworthiness – seem related to likability, and are studied in similar ways, but specifically isolating what it means to be “likable” is difficult.
What does seem clear in the research, Lin says, is that when assessing how much we like someone, our impressions come from two systems. “One is what you see,” like someone’s appearance or mannerisms, she says, “but the other is based on the template I already have in my mind, like prejudice or stereotypes.” These are dubbed “bottom up” and “top down” assessments, respectively. And in practice, these two can combine in ways that disadvantage certain groups.
Does being likable matter?
Being seen as unlikable has huge repercussions. As psychology professor and author Mitchell Prinstein writes in his 1970 book Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-obsessed World, likability and “popularity dynamics affect our careers, our success in meeting our goals, our personal and professional relationships, and ultimately our happiness.”
Society demands likability from some people more than others. Research in this area is typically centered on business and politics, but evidence shows that when women succeed in male-dominated spaces, they are liked less, and this dislike can color assessments such as job evaluations.
Nichole Bauer, an associate professor of political communication at Louisiana State University studies how likability and the pressure to be likable affect political candidates at work and in the real world. “Nobody cares if white men are likable,” she says.
Context changes how we assess likability. Generally, we judge people based on two types of stereotypes, Bauer says. The first relates to qualities or behavior we look for in a person with a certain role – politicians, for example, are expected to be strong and decisive. The second relates to ideas associated with a person’s identity – women are expected to be warm and caring, for example.
We judge individuals based on how well they fill both those expectations, Bauer says, but also on how well those two sets of stereotypes align.
For example, if a woman runs for political office, people will judge her levels of warmth, compassion and kindness – qualities we associate with women, says Bauer. This happens even if those stereotypes are irrelevant to her professional competency.
But if that woman displays “typically masculine” traits associated with desirable political candidates, like strong leadership, many would consider this at odds with her warmth and kindness. “And we don’t like women who aren’t warm and caring,” she says.
These competing sets of traits and expectations prompt a trade-off between seeming well-suited for the position and meeting expectations for how a woman should behave. Either way, Bauer says, even if it’s unavoidable, that dissonance is unlikable. And these dynamics get even more complicated when you layer on additional identity factors, like race.
When identity-related stereotypes match the qualities associated with their role, and that person successfully emulates those stereotypes, that makes them most likable. But Bauer, who has done a lot of research in this area, says she finds, at least in politics, “that only works for white men.” In addition, the research indicates that likability is far less important for men than women when it comes to success or how competent people think someone is.
This is why likability is “such a fuzzy concept”, she says – because our judgments are wrapped up in racialized and gendered norms.
Should we try to be more likable?
We can change how we act, but don’t have control over how others might perceive us. This means the pursuit of being liked can come at the price of contorting our behavior in a way that doesn’t feel true to ourselves.
But Lin says that, in one’s personal life, “I think focusing on likability is not a good thing.” The research shows that likability is influenced by too many variables to name or keep track of. It can change over years or over the course of a conversation – “it’s just a lot of burden to think about so many things,” she says.
If you’re contorting parts of yourself in an effort to be more likable, that’s probably not sustainable. Studies show that working while trying to avoid or refute negative stereotypes attached to your identity is mentally taxing and can affect your performance. Chronically putting up a facade can also contribute to emotional exhaustion and burnout. A better thing to strive for, Tawwab says, is authenticity. “Notice when you are a different version of yourself, when you find yourself faking who you are to fit in,” she says. Of course, we usually can’t be our full and total selves in every context – you’ll behave a little differently at work versus with your partner or with your kids. But generally, “you shouldn’t be afraid to laugh in front of people, or to have a point of view.”
It’s also unrealistic to chase some perfect standard of likability. “Not everyone will like everything about you,” says Tawwab. This can be an especially hard lesson to learn for those with people-pleasing tendencies, who may lack firm boundaries and find it hard to say “no”, she adds.
Ultimately, the idea of likability shifts responsibility for others’ perceptions on to the individual. Bauer says, for example, that when it comes to sexism, people ask: “What magical little thing can women do to get people to stop being sexist?” instead of addressing the people whose behavior is sexist. In particular, asking women, people of color, or any minority to prove to others that they should be liked or respected is inherently unfair. At the end of the day, Bauer says, “it really shouldn’t matter.”
