Why do we like the people we like?

We often talk about likeability as though it were a straightforward quality: being friendly, agreeable, warm or easy to get along with. But the kind of likeability that matters in social life may be more complicated than this. Someone can be charismatic and highly engaging, but also - somehow difficult to trust; another person may be quieter and reserved but leave a strong impression.

I recently found myself thinking about this in a conversation about The Traitors, where likeability can appear to be almost as important as strategy. Who do we instinctively trust? Who do we want to believe? And what makes someone compelling enough that we want to keep watching them, even when we know they may be deceiving us?

These questions led me to wonder whether likeability has something to do rather with how much of ourselves we reveal, but with what we leave unrevealed.

You can be an excellent strategist, intelligent or excellent at ‘reading’ other people, but if the other contestants simply don’t warm to you, your chances of going far may be not that great.

This got me thinking about what we actually mean when we talk about someone being “likeable”.

We tend to think of likeability as something straightforward: some people are warm, friendly, funny or charismatic, and therefore other people like them. But perhaps likeability is more complicated than that. The person who most wants to be liked is not necessarily the person we like most.

There may be something paradoxical about likeability. We are often drawn to people who seem sufficiently comfortable in themselves not to need our approval. They can reveal something of themselves without revealing everything. They can be attentive to us without becoming entirely influenced by our response to them. Something remains that belongs to them.

Likeability and being “alike”

The word likeability itself is interesting. To be likeable is, literally, to be capable of being liked. But there is another word contained within it: alike.

Being alike can create an immediate sense of recognition. We often feel closer to people when we discover something we share. For example, an interest, a value, an experience, a way of seeing the world. Similarity can make another person feel familiar and therefore less threatening. In this sense, being alike can be an important part of how connection begins.

But there is another side to alikeness.

If being likeable means becoming more like what other people already recognise and approve of, likeability can become a form of conformity. We might begin to ask: What do people here like? How should I behave? What version of myself will be accepted?

The desire to belong can gradually become the pressure to become alike.

This does not necessarily happen consciously. We naturally adjust ourselves to the people and environments around us. We learn what is valued, what is rewarded and what is less acceptable. We develop different ways of speaking and behaving depending on contexts. This flexibility is part of being human.

The psychological question is where adaptation ends and the loss of something of oneself begins.

Privacy is not secrecy

This is where I think it is important to distinguish privacy from secrecy.

Privacy is the recognition that not everything about us has to be available to everyone. It is an ordinary and necessary part of having an inner life. We can be open with another person while still having thoughts, feelings, experiences and desires that remain our own.

Secrecy is different. Secrecy involves deliberately keeping something hidden, often because its discovery might have consequences. It can involve fear, shame, protection, deception or the wish to maintain control over information.

Privacy says: “There are parts of me that belong to me.”

Secrecy says: “There is something I do not want you to know.”

The two can overlap, of course. But psychologically they are not the same.

Perhaps what we find compelling about another person is not necessarily that they have secrets, but that they have a self that exists beyond our access to it.

Someone can reveal something of themselves without showing all their cards. They can engage with another person while retaining something private. In this sense, they are almost secret keepers less so because they are deliberately mysterious, but more because they do not feel compelled to disclose everything.

There is a difference between having an inner life and performing mystery.

The Traitor’s paradox

This distinction becomes particularly interesting in The Traitors.

The Traitor cannot simply be private. Their role requires secrecy. They know something fundamental that the other contestants do not know, and they have a reason to conceal it.

However, they also have to create trust.

Their success therefore depends not simply on deception or strategy, but on managing what they reveal and what they withhold. If someone appears too calculated, other contestants may sense that something is being performed. If they reveal too much, they risk exposing themselves. But if they can remain socially open while preserving an apparent inner privacy, they may become both trusted and difficult to read.

The successful Traitor therefore has to perform a peculiar balancing act: to appear sufficiently known while remaining fundamentally unknowable in one important respect.

Perhaps this is one reason likeability matters so much in the game. We are more willing to tolerate uncertainty about someone when we already feel some connection to them.

Winnicott: being yourself in relation to others

British Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott offers a useful way of thinking about this through his distinction between the true self and the false self.

Winnicott did not mean that we should simply reject social expectations and behave spontaneously at all times. We necessarily adapt to our environments. A capacity to adapt is part of functioning in the world.

The difficulty arises when adaptation becomes so dominant and so rigid that we lose contact with something spontaneous in ourselves.

There is a difference between adapting to a situation while being driven to remain true to something in oneself and constructing a version of oneself primarily to satisfy what we imagine other people want. This process usually happens unconsciously, people cannot help constructing themselves one way or another.

This seems particularly relevant to likeability. Someone may become extremely skilled and even preoccupied with producing the response they believe other people want from them, while becoming increasingly uncertain about what they themselves want.

In that sense, the question might be, what happens to us when being liked becomes the organising principle of how we relate to other people?

Marion Milner and the freedom to be spontaneous

Psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s thinking about creativity offers another way into this question.

Creativity, in her work, is not restricted to artistic production. It involves spontaneity, play and the ability to allow something unexpected to emerge rather than controlling every aspect of experience.

There is something similar in human relationships.

When we are constantly monitoring ourselves: Do they like me? Did I say the right thing? How am I coming across? What should I do next? We can become less spontaneous precisely because we are trying so hard to produce the right impression.

The interaction becomes a performance.

By contrast, when we are sufficiently at ease with ourselves, we can respond to another person rather than simply performing for them. We leave room for something unexpected to happen between us.

This connects with Winnicott’s idea of potential space: the space between inner and outer reality in which play, creativity and relationship can take place.

Perhaps compelling likeability has something to do with allowing this space to exist.

Connection needs both similarity and difference

This brings us back to the question of being alike.

We need some degree of similarity to recognise ourselves in other people. Shared interests, values and experiences can create belonging. But we also need difference.

If someone is completely adapted to us, constantly agreeing with us and becoming whatever we appear to want, there may eventually be very little person left to encounter.

We want to recognise something of ourselves in another person, but we also want them to be someone other than ourselves.

This may be one of the reasons that privacy matters. The existence of something that remains outside our access reminds us that the other person is a separate subject, not simply an extension of ourselves.

Happiness, belonging and the need for others

Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis is useful here because it emphasises the deeply social nature of human wellbeing. Our relationships and sense of belonging matter enormously to how we experience our lives.

But belonging is not necessarily the same as being liked.

If happiness is partly connected to our relationships with others, it can be tempting to conclude that we should become as likeable as possible. Yet this risks turning relationships into another form of performance:

If I behave correctly, people will like me. If people like me, I will belong. If I belong, I will be happy.

Human relationships are unlikely to work so neatly.

We need connection, but we also need separateness. We need belonging, but we also need a sense that our lives are our own.

Perhaps psychological wellbeing involves finding a way of being with others that allows both: to belong without being absorbed, and to remain separate without becoming disconnected. For some people, this is at the heart of psychotherapy: to find a way to occupy both positions in life.

Can we learn to be likeable?

This makes the question of whether likeability is an innate trait or a skill rather more complicated.

Of course, we can learn to listen more carefully, communicate more effectively, become more aware of how we affect other people and become more comfortable in social situations.

But before asking How can I become more likeable?, I would ask: Why do I want to become more likeable?

Is it because I want to feel more at ease with myself and with other people? Will it allow me to relate differently and perhaps more freely?

Or is it because I believe that being more likeable will bring me success, admiration, social acceptance or professional advancement?

These motivations are not mutually exclusive. Our internal desires are always intertwined with our experience of other people and the world. But there is a difference between developing ourselves because something feels meaningful to us and reshaping ourselves because we believe we have to become what others expect.

The paradox of likeability

Perhaps, then, the question is not How do I make people like me?

It is something more difficult:

Can I remain sufficiently myself to have something of my own to bring to another person, while remaining sufficiently open to allow something new to emerge between us?

The people we find most compelling may not be those who reveal everything, nor those who deliberately conceal everything. They may be those who can tolerate the space between the two.

They give us enough of themselves for connection, while retaining enough of themselves for difference, curiosity and discovery.

Perhaps that is the paradox of likeability:

We want to feel that someone is like us, but we also want them to remain someone other than us. We want to know them, but we do not necessarily want to know everything. And perhaps we are most drawn to people who can be with us without needing to become like us.