The Science of First Impressions: Why Warmth — Not Confidence — Creates Deeper Attraction
Most people walk into a first meeting trying to appear impressive — confident, capable, ready to demonstrate their value. Research shows that this instinct, while not wrong exactly, is optimized for the wrong goal. If what you actually want is for someone to genuinely like you — not just admire you or remember you as impressive — the science points to a very different approach. The key, it turns out, is not how commanding you seem. It’s how warm you make someone feel.
Two Ways of Being Liked — And Why They’re Different
There are two distinct forms of being liked, and most people spend their lives optimizing for only one of them. The first is popularity — being generally well-regarded by others in a group. The second is unique liking — the feeling one person has that they are specifically, particularly drawn to you. Both matter. But they are not the same thing, and they are not created by the same behaviors.
Think about the people you’ve encountered who are clearly popular. They draw rooms toward them, tell stories people want to hear, and seem universally appreciated. Now think about the people you’ve genuinely felt pulled toward — the ones you sought out in a crowd, the ones you left a party thinking about. These are often different people. And according to a landmark study in Psychological Science, they are getting their results through very different behavioral means.
The Research: What Happens When Strangers Meet
In 2023, psychologists Michael Dufner and Sascha Krause published a study examining what predicts being liked during first encounters. They recruited 139 unacquainted German adults and had them engage in short conversations with people they had never met. Afterward, each person rated how much they liked their conversation partners — both in terms of general popularity (how well-liked the person seemed overall) and unique liking (how specifically drawn they personally felt to that individual).
The researchers measured eight behaviors during the conversations, divided into two categories. The four agentic behaviors: dominant, leading, boastful, and confident. The four communal behaviors: warm, friendly, polite, and benevolent.
The results were striking. Both agentic and communal behaviors predicted general popularity — people who seemed either dominant or warm tended to be well-liked overall. But when it came to unique liking — the feeling of being specifically attracted to one person — only communal behavior was predictive. Agentic behavior played no significant role.
What unique liking looks like in practice vs. general popularity:
- Popularity: people want to be around you in a group setting
- Unique liking: a person specifically seeks you out or thinks about the interaction afterward
- Popularity: people speak well of you to others
- Unique liking: someone feels that you “get” them in a way others don’t
- Popularity: you’re invited to the party
- Unique liking: you’re the person they wanted to talk to at the party
What Agentic Behavior Does Well — And Where It Falls Short
Dominance and Extraversion in Group Settings
Agentic behavior isn’t useless — it’s just context-specific. A 2024 study by Buss and colleagues published in the British Journal of Social Psychology found that dominant behaviors mediate the link between extraversion and popularity in both face-to-face and virtual group interactions. In other words, when you’re in a group — a networking event, a conference panel, a team meeting — the person who speaks up, holds attention, and projects confidence tends to be remembered and well-regarded.
This makes evolutionary and social sense. In group settings, dominant behaviors serve as status signals. People who talk more, hold eye contact, use expansive gestures, and take up conversational space are perceived as having influence — and groups tend to like people they perceive as influential.
The Ceiling of Confidence
The limitation of this advantage appears clearly when you look at relationship depth over time. Research consistently shows that extraverts, despite building larger social networks, tend to maintain more superficial relationships than introverts. They’re known by more people but closely known by fewer. Dominant behavior creates recognition and broad social approval. It does not, on its own, create the conditions for someone to feel genuinely connected to you.
The reason is straightforward: agentic behavior is, by definition, self-beneficial. It signals your own value, competence, and status. People appreciate that. But appreciation is not the same as the warm pull of genuine connection, which requires something different entirely.
Why Warmth Is the Key to Genuine Connection
The Evolutionary Priority of Warmth
Decades of research on social cognition, most notably by Susan Fiske and Amy Cuddy, have established that when we encounter another person, we make two fundamental assessments: warmth (what are this person’s intentions?) and competence (what is this person capable of?). These two dimensions account for the vast majority of how we perceive and respond to others socially.
Critically, warmth is assessed first. Evolutionarily, this makes sense: it is far more important to know whether someone intends to help or harm you than to know how capable they are of carrying out either. A highly competent person with bad intentions is more dangerous than an incompetent one. So our social brains run the warmth check before the competence check, and the warmth assessment largely determines whether we open up to the interaction at all.
This means that all the confidence and accomplishment in the world arrives at a closed door if it isn’t preceded by signals of warmth and benign intention.
What Communal Behavior Actually Looks Like
The communal behaviors Dufner and Krause measured — warm, friendly, polite, benevolent — share a common logic: they are behaviors that create benefit for the other person, not primarily for yourself. Communal behavior, in this research framework, is about signaling that you are for the other person, not just for yourself.
Five specific communal behaviors backed by research on first impressions:
- Smiling genuinely: Duchenne smiles (involving eye muscles, not just the mouth) are recognized as authentic and trigger warmth reciprocity in the other person
- Expressing positive emotion openly: People who share enthusiasm, delight, and humor in first meetings create emotional resonance that the other person experiences as personal connection
- Asking questions about the other person’s interests and experiences: Genuine curiosity signals that the other person is interesting, not just a potential audience for your own story
- Active, attentive listening: Paraphrasing, nodding, maintaining engaged eye contact, and responding to what was actually said rather than waiting for your turn to speak
- Being present rather than impressive: Resisting the impulse to name-drop, demonstrate credentials, or compete sends the signal that you’re interested in the encounter, not the performance
How to Apply This in Real Life
Dating
The implications for dating are immediate and often counterintuitive. Many people walk into first dates trying to present the most impressive version of themselves: interesting career, exciting stories, confident demeanor. These things are not bad. But research suggests that what creates genuine romantic interest is not being impressive — it’s making the other person feel seen.
Active listening is the most underrated first-date tool available to you. When someone tells a story and you ask a follow-up question that shows you actually heard what they said, they don’t experience you as a good listener. They experience you as someone who finds them interesting. And people who make us feel interesting are deeply attractive. The practical move: ask questions that give the other person room to go deeper, not questions that redirect the conversation back to you.
Networking and Professional Settings
Professional contexts call for a blend — but with different emphases at different moments. In large group settings (conferences, panel introductions, team presentations), some degree of agentic behavior is appropriate and functional. You need to project enough confidence to be noticed and taken seriously. In one-on-one follow-up conversations, coffee meetings, or new team integrations, communal behavior becomes far more valuable. The people who are remembered fondly and deeply trusted are those who showed genuine interest, listened carefully, and made the other person feel like the interaction was about them, not about the impression being managed.
The combination that tends to work best professionally: agentic enough to be taken seriously in the room, communal enough to be the person they actually want to work with.
New Social Groups and Friendships
New friendships are not made through single impressive performances. They are made through accumulated small moments of warmth: remembering what someone mentioned last time, asking how a difficult situation resolved, sharing something slightly vulnerable, laughing at the same thing. These are communal acts. They signal that you are paying attention, that the other person matters to you, and that your interest is genuine rather than strategic.
Research on friendship formation consistently shows that consistency of warmth over time predicts friendship depth far more reliably than the quality of any single interaction. The practical implication: stop trying to be the most interesting person in the room. Focus on making the person you’re talking to feel like the most interesting person in the room. The depth of their liking for you will follow.
Conclusion
The research doesn’t say confidence is bad. Dominant, agentic behavior has real social value in the right settings. What it does say is that warmth is what creates the kind of liking that leads to real relationships — the kind where someone seeks you out, thinks about you afterward, and feels a genuine pull in your direction.
The next time you walk into a room wanting to make an impression: don’t think about how to seem impressive. Think about how to make the person in front of you feel genuinely seen. That’s the behavior that creates unique liking. And unique liking is what real connection is made of.
Sources
What Type of First Impressions Spark Unique Attraction? | Psychology Today
