Who Will Be My Friend? The Role of the Liking Gap in Preschooler Friend Selection

Friend selection is a crucial aspect of social development, particularly during preschool years. This study investigated the role of the liking gap in shaping preschoolers' friend selection mechanisms through two experiments. In Experiment 1 (<i>N</i> = 120), a liking gap task was used to examine whether preschoolers perceive a discrepancy between how much they like familiar friends and how much they believe those friends like them in return. The results indicated that preschoolers tend to assume that their most liked peers evaluate them less positively than they do in return, whereas they believe their least liked peers evaluate them more favorably than expected. In Experiment 2 (<i>N</i> = 117), a friend selection task was conducted to assess whether the liking gap influences preschoolers' choices of friends among unfamiliar peers. The findings revealed that while preschoolers prefer to befriend individuals they like or who like them, their decisions also reflect an awareness of how they are perceived by others. These results suggest that by ages 5 to 6, preschoolers develop an emerging sensitivity to social evaluations, which plays a role in their friend selection process.