On a 7-point scale, participants reported liking their partner at an average of 5.82. But they predicted their partner liked them at only 5.17 — a real, measurable gap between the warmth people actually felt and the warmth they assumed was being returned, in the same conversation, among the same two people. Why the gap opens up in the first placeThe researchers point to a few reasons this happens. At every time point except the last one, students underestimated how much their suite mates liked them. It’s sustained, ordinary contact — the unglamorous accumulation of a semester’s worth of hallway small talk doing what no single conversation, however good, can do on its own.