Why making friends at university feels harder than it really is

The summer before starting university can be a time of multiple worries for students. Worry about obtaining a place on your desired course. Worry about navigating clearing to confirm your place. Worries about securing accommodation, sorting student finance, preparation for academic studies and even finding the right stationery are also common.

Yet many students’ biggest concern is social in nature: “will I make friends?”. Surveys consistently suggest that loneliness and belonging are major concerns for new students starting university. This challenge isn’t unique to shy or socially anxious students. Most freshers experience worries about fitting in and making connections when starting university, especially when others make it seem so easy.

Something I find in my research with colleagues is how poor we are at estimating others’ beliefs, feelings and behaviour. We also overestimate how much other people notice our own behaviour and any social missteps.

In social psychology, there are two related psychological biases that can explain this pattern. First, the “spotlight effect” explains how we wrongly assume that other people are paying attention to our behaviour. Psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky, who have studied this effect, state that people assume the “social spotlight” shines more brightly on themselves than it actually does.

The other bias, the “illusion of transparency”, explains how people wrongly assume that others can view our feelings, worries and thoughts. In essence, we think that our internal state leaks out socially, and we overestimate how much others will harshly judge us as a result.

So, when we perceive an introduction to a new person to be awkward, forget someone’s name, run out of things to say or generally feel embarrassed after a conversation, it is likely that our perception of these interactions doesn’t match the other person’s. That’s assuming other people even paid much attention in the first place. For students starting university, this means many perceived social failures are largely invisible to others.

The surprising psychology of first conversations

Evidence also suggests people routinely underestimate how much they are liked after speaking with strangers. This is another psychological phenomenon, the “liking gap”. We might think that other people like us less than they actually do (the actual liking gap), or we like a conversation partner more than we think they like us back (a perceived liking gap).

It can be difficult to really know how well a conversation with a stranger has gone. Conversations can be cognitively demanding, requiring us to concentrate and listen to the other person, while following social conventions and expectations around politeness. We might miss key social cues about how the other person is feeling during interactions. As a result, we are often left to estimate how well the conversation went. These estimates are often more self-critical and uncertain than the reality.

After conversations, people tend to think they made a worse impression than they actually did. Students may stop pursuing potentially successful friendships because they wrongly assume initial conversations went badly, or underestimate others’ interest in making conversation.

Small talk matters

Small talk is often wrongly dismissed as being unimportant and superficial. But engaging in small talk can have a number of positive benefits. It creates a sense of familiarity with others, that familiarity promoting trust and liking, and it contributes to improved wellbeing and strengthening social bonds. Small talk is not the opposite of meaningful conversation. Actually, this is often the first step towards more meaningful interactions, developing social bonds and friendships.

Read more:
Small talk acts like social glue – here’s how to get better at it

I take inspiration from a professor I worked with who moved across the country to start a new job in a brand new city. This professor, who describes herself as shy, made small talk with a woman as they stood waiting to cross the road near the university. This bit of small talk led to a lasting friendship with “Traffic Light Lady”. Even professors find making friends anxiety-provoking. But brief small talk can be the important first step towards establishing social rapport and developing friendships.

Friendship is usually slower than we expect

Surprisingly, friendships take time to develop. An older psychological phenomenon, the “mere exposure” effect, explains how friendships may emerge over time. Simply put, the more we come into contact with an object or a person, the more likely we are to like that object or person over time. So for friendships, meaningful connections may be built through repeated interactions rather than instant chemistry.

For students, if you feel that you haven’t found your people during freshers week, don’t worry. Chances are the people you meet over the subsequent weeks – during lectures, at society meetings, social events or even in the queue for a coffee – are where friendships emerge. In fact, research estimates that it can take between 40-60 hours to develop a casual friendship in the first six weeks after meeting.

Making friends, whether at university or generally in life, takes time and repeated interactions. We often misperceive and overthink how well social interactions have gone. The importance of small talk, finding similar interests and shared experiences, and being patient, can help to build a sense of familiarity, trust and safety.

Psychology suggests that we are often overly harsh and self-critical in our perceptions of our social interactions and how others view us. In reality, friendships often begin not with brilliant conversation, but with ordinary moments repeated over time.