"Being noticed would be bad"

Suppose for a moment that somebody does notice. The person at the next table looks up and sees you properly, on your own with a book by the window. Somebody at the meeting really does register your point. The audience's last defence is that this is the bad outcome, that to be seen is to be marked down, so the aim is to get through the room unseen.

Most noticing isn't judgement. It's just noticing. And where research has looked at what people actually think of us once they've paid us attention, the finding runs the other way from what the beam predicts. Erica Boothby and colleagues published a set of studies in 2018 on what they called the liking gap, which an earlier book in this series, Ring them first, used for friendships. After conversations, people underestimated how much the other person had liked them and enjoyed their company. It held for strangers in a laboratory, for students getting to know the people they lived with, and for members of the public at a workshop, and among the students it lasted for months. People who had paid you real attention, enough to talk to you, came away thinking better of you than you thought they did.

That's conversation, which is more than a glance across a café, and I'm extending it. But the shape is the same as chapter 6. The view people take, when they take one, is milder and warmer than the one you write for them. Being seen by a stranger is not the same as being marked by one, and being seen by someone who then talks to you is on average a good thing that you'll misremember as a bad one.

Try to think of the last time you noticed someone in a room, really noticed, and what you felt. Sometimes it was a small unkindness, I'll grant. Mostly it was nothing much, or a flicker of interest, or a flicker of liking, the person with the good coat, the person laughing at their book. You are, to other people, sometimes the person laughing at their book. The audience never allows for that.