Assessing General Liking Or Likability

Assessing general liking or likability can sometimes be very useful. This is when you draw useful information from a slice of behaviour that you see and make judgements upon it. I made judgements such as these the first time I met my friend Talon.

The first time we met we talked for about one minute. In that one minute, I was assessing my general likeability of him whilst we talked. The first time I met him I noticed many nonverbal cues such as what I thought were aggressive tendencies and poses of pride and dominance. He seemed to be showing very manly and show-offish behaviours, trying to show his comfort and confidence to a new person with poses of strength and power. I also thought that he looked aggressive. This could have been because he is a body builder and he is over 6 feet tall, so these assumptions could have come naturally considering his height and weight in comparison to my other friends and people around him at the time. These assumptions could be attributed to the self-enhancement effect. This self-enhancement effect is when people attempt to show off their best possible view of themselves which contrasts with the self-verification effect where they try to show a realistic image of who they are. Usually, when you first meet someone they try and show off their best qualities before you really get to know them. This could be why he was displaying confidence, comfort, strength and power through his actions.

Another thing I noticed about Talon was his tattoos and piercings, this gave me the idea that he would be someone who qualified as a low self-monitor. I assumed that he was a low self-monitor because many of the men I know who are big with tattoos and piercings are very set in their ways, do not care how people think and are take it or leave it kind of people. That assumption could be known as a false consensus because I negatively assumed that he was just like everyone else I had previously known with the same characteristics. When I got to know Talon better and in different social situations I realized that in fact, he was actually a very high self-monitoring person. He was able to get along with many different crowds and blend seamlessly into different groups. Let it be noted that my false consensus, that he was like everyone else I met with similar characteristics, was wrong. When Talon and I were talking during our first one-minute conversation he mentioned working out a lot, which I deemed as a judgement of importance on his part. He seemed to believe that physically working out was a very important skill because it is something he is good at. That judgement of importance was a good judgement to make because now that I know Talon better, and I know that he spends a significant amount of time in the gym, and that athleticism is something important that he notes in the people around him because it is something that he is proud of and that he is good at. Talon has a habit of indulging in alcoholic beverages which I noticed upon one of our first conversations as well. I noticed this because we were at a party when we met. I thought this would be a good example of self-regulation.

Self-regulation is the ability to monitor and control your thoughts, feelings and behaviours. In the self-regulation definition, it talks about willpower being an example, it goes on to say that willpower is a basic resource that can be depleted. Talon could be depleting his willpower resource when he is making himself workout for long periods of time per day, and this could mean that he has less willpower to stay away from alcoholic beverages in the evenings because he could have exhausted his willpower throughout the day. In my explaining of his behaviour, I could be overusing dispositional attributions relating to the indulging of alcoholic beverages to Talon’s personality and not considering the situational attributions as to why he could be indulging in alcoholic beverages. For example, one situational attribution that I overlooked could be that Talon was at a party where there was a lot of drinking, and for me to assume that his indulging in alcoholic beverages was because of his lack of willpower and not the party and who he was with which is potentially overusing dispositional attributions to explain his behaviour and not giving enough credit to the situation that he was in.

Overall Talon is not really like what I had originally assumed from our first conversation, he is very open and not aggressive, despite his looks, he is a high self-monitoring person and he has shown a lot more emphasis on self-verification now that we are friends and is not concerned as much with self-enhancement. In short, I was wrong with my original assessment of my general likeability of Talon and I am happy that I reconsidered my opinion, and that he had proven otherwise against my original attributions, stereotypes and perceptions and that I now have a new friend.