A shitty thing about being human and trying to form relationships with other humans is that you have to try to read from their signals how excited they are about interacting with you. And you really can err in both directions, and they’re both bad.
One thing that at least helps is having somewhat well-defined relationships and levels of commitment. If I ignore my sister’s text, well long-term it might add a tiny amount to the erosion or our relationship, but short term her assumption will never be “oh, she doesn’t like me” but “oh, she is busy and flaky and sucks at texting people back, but I’ll try again tomorrow.” Because she’s my sister, it’s not true that I can’t end our relationship, but the threshold is a lot higher; there’s a strong prior that we’re good, so I’d have to be very proactive and explicit if I wanted to cut her off.
Most people are probably biased in one direction or another. I think for most of my life I’ve been too insecure; because I had a negative self-image I was biased toward assuming that people didn’t want to interact with me.
And I think I’ve been getting better at that, which is cool. But disappointingly, getting better at that doesn’t really make the original problem go away.
There is a real problem there, that isn’t just 100% cognitive biases; sometimes people just don’t really like you that much, and you do need to be aware enough to notice that.
But the main problem isn’t of prediction, it’s of coordination. If you’re unsure of how much someone likes you, it makes perfect sense to be more reserved in your interactions, to hold yourself back. And it’s so easy to get into that feedback loop, and so hard to get out