Who will like me? Individual differences in the sources of meta-liking judgments at zero-acquaintance

People have general working models of how likeable they are from past experiences, but do some people apply these models more flexibly than others? In two studies, we used the extended Social Relations Model to index how much within-person variability in people’s meta-liking judgments at zero-acquaintance was the result of tracking a shared reality of target differences (sensitivity) versus distinguishing between targets in unique ways (differentiation). We found that the main source of variability was making unique distinctions across targets (differentiation). Importantly, there were individual differences in both sensitivity and differentiation, and the latter was related to narcissism, social anxiety, and neuroticism. This work demonstrates the flexibility of some people’s working models of themselves in relation to others.