People underestimate how much dissimilar others want to connect

People systematically underestimate the extent to which dissimilar others are interested in socially connecting, a phenomenon we refer to as dissimilarity pessimism. Across six experiments, in the lab (N = 795), online (N = 2,681), and in the field (N = 457), we document this pessimism across multiple kinds of dissimilarity, including age, race, personality, job type, and sociocultural background. We explore two psychological processes that appear associated with these effects: greater uncertainty about how interested others are in connecting, relative to one's own interest in connecting; and a tendency for the thoughts that spontaneously come to mind about an interaction to skew negative when imagining how a partner might perceive them. We also find that people's overly pessimistic beliefs are associated with their choice of whom to approach, identifying a previously underappreciated antecedent of "homophily," people's tendency to associate with similar others. In other words, people may avoid dissimilar others not because they themselves are uninterested or because they lack the opportunity-the two explanations most commonly offered in the literature-but because they mistakenly believe dissimilar others are uninterested in them. Finally, we conduct a field experiment in collaboration with Mystery Minds, an organization dedicated to connecting employees across differences, and find that this pessimism emerges before naturally occurring workplace conversations, even among people who had opted into meeting dissimilar colleagues and personally welcomed the interaction. Together, these findings advance our understanding of metaperception, intergroup interaction, homophily, and the social cognition of conversation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).