Do I Seem Friendly, Awkward, or Creepy? Meta-Perceptions of Friendship Bids Predict Social Outcomes Across the Lifespan

Making a new friend often requires taking a social risk, such as asking for someone’s number or inviting them to hang out. People may hesitate to make these bids because they have pessimistic expectations about how they will be perceived. We propose that these expectations reflect generalized, multidimensional construals people apply to friendship opportunities, even before receiving any feedback from a partner. Across five preregistered experiments (four vignette-based and one field study; N = 1,270) with college and Prolific samples, people believed others would judge their friendship bids more harshly (meta-perception) than they judge others’ bids (other-perception), revealing a recurring self-other asymmetry across varied friendship bid scenarios. A data-driven approach identified a novel three-dimensional, hierarchical structure underlying these perceptions: one positive dimension (e.g., friendly, warm) and two distinct negative subdimensions—hesitant-negative (e.g., anxious, socially awkward) and assertive-negative (e.g., desperate, creepy). Age emerged as one meaningful source of variation, with smaller self-other asymmetries among older adults. Lastly, the three dimensions of meta- andother-perception of friendship bids differentially predicted both short-term social judgments (e.g., willingness to initiate) and real-world outcomes (e.g., network size). Together, these findings suggest that friendship initiation is shaped by generalized, multidimensional relational construals that operate before an interaction begins and may influence whether opportunities for connection are pursued across the lifespan.