Take our Likeable Person Test to determine how likeable you are and see how to make people like you with customized suggestions based on the quiz. You can be instantly likable and have an immediate impact on everyone you meet!
Likeable Person Test
Take our fun likable person test above to see if you are a likeable person.
This likeability test is based on the following ways to be more likeable. After you complete the quiz, it will give you personalized suggestions on how to be more likeable based on your answers.
How to be more likeable
When we meet people for the first time, we are forced to think of the right thing to say and how we should present ourselves. Do you shake their hand, make eye contact or small talk? Many people feel so uncomfortable in these situations that they prefer to avoid the hassle and not make new friends or connections. They stick with the friends they have and stay in their comfort zone.
The book “How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less” (2000) is a guide to help you be more likable and to connect with people easily. It will help you start a conversation with strangers and make them like you. It will also show you how to better understand their gestures. Nicholas Boothman, the author, is an expert in neuro-linguistic programming. He has spent the last 20 years studying how people connect and communicate.
Did you know that when you meet someone, you only have around 90 seconds to make an impression and form a connection? If you don’t spark the person’s interest in that time, then it’s more than likely that you’ll never spark it.
Here are some tips from the book to make you more likeable and kindle connection in under 90 seconds.
Pay attention to your body language, eyes, and facial expression
When you meet someone for the first time, they start forming their opinion about you before you even say a word. They notice your body, your eyes and the expression on your face.
Therefore, when you first meet someone, pay attention to your body language, eyes and facial expression. It is very important that they all display a feeling of openness.
How do you display open body language? Body language begins in your mind. Your mind sends unintentional signals that are perceived subconsciously by the person you are communicating with.
We can divide body language into two categories: open and closed. Open body language exposes your heart and body. This signals to others that you want to communicate. On the other hand, closed body language sends the opposite message. This is done by crossing your arms or turning your body sideways so that you don’t face the person with whom you are talking. Your facial expressions can also be open or closed. For example, an open face smiles makes eye contact, and displays clear expressions such as raised eyebrows, while a closed face looks stern and avoids eye contact.
Try to mirror the person’s mannerism
Mirroring mannerisms is something that is done without thinking about it and can help you make people feel relaxed in your presence.
We usually feel best when we are with people whose behavior is in sync with our own. In fact, studies have shown that we even tend to hire and date people who look like us.
To increase your likeability, you can discreetly copy and subtly imitate the gestures, body posture, facial expressions, breathing and tone of voice of the person with whom you are talking to. You can also dress in a similar way. For example, when you go to a casual event where everyone is going to be dressed casually, you don’t want to go in a suit.
This is something that good salespeople often do. It increases their chance of making the sale.
For example, when talking to a quiet person it is better to match their quiet demeanor and not raise your voice. If someone keeps a distance from you, then you don’t want to stand too close to them and certainly don’t want to touch them.
Ask the right questions and know how to listen
When talking to someone be present. Listen to what they say and be aware of the person’s body language. If your mind wanders the person will detect this. Many people don’t actually listen to the person speaking, instead, they start thinking about what they are going to say next.
Asking questions is not only a good way to start a conversation but it also shows the other person that you are listening to them and you care about what they are saying. This makes people like and appreciate you.
However, questions can either open people up or close them down.
- In order to open people up, start with questions that invite other people to talk. Use conversation-generating words like “Who,” “When,” “What,” “Where,” “How” and “Why” to get the other person to respond and to keep the conversation flowing.
- Closed questions, on the other hand, encourage a yes or no response and are formed with phrases like “Are you…,” “Have you…” and “Do you….” For example, “Is this your first time here?”.
When the person responds to your question, it is important to listen actively. It’s not enough to listen to what they say, you need to pay attention to that person’s feelings and emotions as well. To do this, use eye contact without staring, listen with your body by facing your heart toward the speaker, lean in and nod your head when you agree with what is being said.
When the other person is speaking, don’t interrupt. Listen carefully. Show empathy and interest in what they have said and ask more questions. Don’t automatically move the conversation on to yourself by sharing your similar experiences.
Be positive
Nobody likes people who complain all the time and drain their energy. People who have positive energy are more likable than negative people. When you smile, you show the other person your positive attitude.
If you find it hard to be positive then try using gratitude to change your mindset. It is a powerful way to make you more positive. You can also write about negative feelings and experiences in your journal instead of complaining to others.
Don’t try to get attention
People who are always trying to get attention or show how important they are, are not likeable.
Be friendly
People like those who are friendly, warm, and open. These people make others feel comfortable.
Be considerate and kind
People like it when you are considerate and appreciate their time and effort. Be thankful when people go out of their way to do things for you and don’t take them for granted. Appreciation is closely linked to likeability.
Be reliable
People who can be counted on are more likable. If you say you are going to do something then keep your word.
Give genuine compliments
Give the person a genuine compliment. Don’t make up something just to compliment them. Instead, find a genuine reason to say something nice.
Research shows that one of the ways to be perceived as more likable is by giving people compliments. Most of us like receiving compliments and we tend to like people more, if they give us compliments. A study by Grant et al. (2010, according to Hills, T., (2014, February 13), The Power of a Compliment) showed how compliments drastically affect the perceived liking of a person. It also doubled the chances of persuading someone into doing you a favor as a result of the increased likeability, whereas those who did not receive a compliment were less likely to do a favor.
Give gifts
Another strategy to be perceived as more likable is by giving people a gift. Regan (1971) showed in a study that it is possible to give participants a gift and thus
manipulate their perception of how likeable you are (Regan, D., (1971), Effects of a Favor and Liking on Compliance).
Be genuine
People can sense when you are not genuine. Just like people can sense when your smile isn’t genuine.
We like genuine people because we know that we can trust them. You can’t trust someone if you don’t know who they are.
Be present when you communicate with people
Don’t let your mind wander and don’t get distracted by the things around you such as noises, people or even smells. Put your phone away and stay focused on the person.
The person will sense your full attention and it will make you more likeable.
Be open-minded
If you want to be likeable, you cannot be judgmental. Try to see the world through other people’s eyes and not just through your own eyes. You don’t have to agree with them or adopt their opinions. You just need to understand and accept that they are different and let them be who they are without trying to change them.
Humor
People are more likable when they make others laugh or smile. We all want to be happy and appreciate people who make us feel that way. When you are around positive happy people you feel better than you do with negative people who drain your energy. You certainly don’t need to be funny all the time. That isn’t necessarily a good thing either. Find a good balance and use humor when it is helpful such as to break the tension in difficult situations.
Find Shared Interests
One of the best ways to start a good and natural conversation is if you talk about shared interests. If you enjoy similar hobbies, watching similar movies, or travelling to the same places you will find it easier to make conversation.
Have a useful attitude
If, however, no such common ground exists, you need to work a little harder. In order to do this, Boothman explains that you need to have a useful attitude and not a useless attitude.
A useful attitude means you’re focused on what you want out of the conversation, while a useless one is focused on what you don’t want out of the conversation.
When you have a useful attitude, you automatically show positive body language and facial expressions that will make you more likable. On the other hand, when you have a useless attitude your body language will be passive or negative and that puts people off.
How to adopt a useful attitude
Decide what you want from each conversation. When you begin a conversation, consider your end goal and the approach that will help you reach it efficiently.
For example, you arrive at your hotel and your room isn’t ready yet. If you have a useful attitude, you’ll try to find someone who can help you get another room instead. Since you will be more likable and the person will want to help you they will do their best to find a solution. On the other hand, if you have a useless attitude, you might start yelling and threatening the staff and they will have no incentive to help you. When you focus on the desired positive outcome from the conversation – getting a room as soon as possible – you’ll adopt the body language that will make them want to help you.
The Reysen Likability Scale
The Reysen Likability Scale was developed by Dr. Stephen Reyson, Ph.D. It measures the perceived likability of a person. Before the scale was developed there wasn’t a single tool to measure likability. The tips above on how to be more likeable and the likeability quiz are based on this scale that includes the following parameters: similarity, open-mindedness, friendliness, humor, kindness, positivity, and trustworthiness.
How to be likeable when you meet someone for the first time
When you meet someone for the first time, it is important to display openness. How do you do this?
- Position your body with your heart aimed directly toward them. This communicates sincerity, full commitment to the conversation and a readiness to connect.
- Look directly into their eyes. Direct eye contact is a great way to establish trust. It is very important when you first meet someone.
- Be the first one to smile. When you smile, you show the other person your positive attitude. As a result, they will subconsciously understand that you’re sincere and open. It’s very easy to tell if your smile is sincere or fake. A fake smile involves your mouth only whereas a sincere smile is seen in your eyes as well.
- Introduce yourself. Don’t overthink it. Simply offer a standard greeting like “hi” or “hello” in a pleasant tone.
- Tell the person your first name and encourage them to introduce themselves as well.
- Once they introduce themselves, repeat their name to ensure you remember it. For example, say “Nice to meet you, Tom!”. When you see this person again, greet them by name.
- Lean slightly toward the other person to gently show interest and openness. As you do this, you can either shake their hand firmly or use the hands-free technique in which you leave your hands by your sides.
Why is it important to likeable?
Meeting new people and making new friends and good connections with people has many benefits.
In the book “How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less” the author, explains the benefits of meeting new people and making new connections.
- Meeting new people will expand your social circle and help you develop your interpersonal skills – skills that can bring both personal and professional benefits.
- Bonding with people is beneficial to our health and well-being. A study by Dr. Lisa Berkman of the Harvard School of Health Sciences observed a group of 7,000 people over nine years and determined that those of us who are good at connecting with others stand a better chance of living a long life. The results showed that those who lacked quality social or community connections were 3 times more likely to die of a medical illness than those who had strong social ties.
- A wide social network will help you achieve your goals. You will be more likely to hear about new opportunities and get help when you need it.
- When someone is likeable they are more likeable to influence other people (Chaiken, S. & Eagly, A. H., 1983).
Are you wondering “am I a likeable person”? Take our likable person test above to find out!
I used to think I was the likeable one. Not in an arrogant way — just quietly, the way you assume your own handwriting is legible. Then someone told me, kindly and about six years too late, that I have a habit of finishing people’s sentences for them. I had no idea. I’d been doing it for decades, in every conversation, to everyone.
That is the whole problem with a likeable person test. You cannot see yourself from the outside. And likeability is not a quality you possess, like height. It is something that happens in someone else’s head, in the ninety seconds after you leave the room.
So this test does two things. First, it measures how likeable you think you are, across six dimensions that research has actually connected to being liked. Then it lets you find out whether you were right — by sending the same questions to someone who knows you.
What this likeable person test measures
The test takes about four minutes. You answer on a five-point scale, and you get a score out of 100, a profile across six dimensions, and a plain-English read on how you probably come across.
Before you start, it asks you to guess your own score. Don’t skip that part. It turns out to be the most interesting number in the whole thing, for reasons I’ll get to.
The six dimensions are not arbitrary, and they are not a personality type dressed up as science. Each one is a thing that has been measured, repeatedly, in people deciding whether they like someone.
Warmth
Whether you feel safe to be around. Not nice — safe. There’s a difference, and people can smell it.
Warmth is the heaviest-weighted dimension in the test, and that isn’t a stylistic choice. Work by Susan Fiske and her colleagues found that when we size someone up, we judge warmth first and we judge it faster, and it carries more weight in the overall impression than competence does. We decide whether you’re friend or threat before we decide whether you’re any good at your job. Everything else you bring gets filtered through that first verdict.
This is also why brilliance without warmth reads as arrogance, while warmth without brilliance reads as charming.
Curiosity
Whether you ask, and whether you ask again.
There’s a lovely piece of research from Karen Huang and colleagues at Harvard: across face-to-face conversations and speed dates, people who asked more questions were better liked — and the effect was strongest for follow-up questions specifically. Not the opening question. The second one. The one that proves you were actually listening to the answer rather than waiting for your turn.
Almost nobody does this. Which is exactly why it works.
Presence
Whether people feel you are actually there.
This is the one that gets quietly destroyed by phones, by rehearsing your next sentence, and — in my case — by finishing other people’s. Presence is not the same as extroversion. Some of the most magnetic people I know barely talk. They just look at you like you’re the only thing happening.
If you want to go deeper on this, the chapter on empathetic listening in my summary of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is the single best thing I’ve read on it. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. It sounds like a fridge magnet until you actually try it and realise you’ve never once done it properly.
Uplift
Whether people leave you feeling better than they arrived.
Here’s the finding that reordered my thinking. Shelly Gable’s research on how couples respond to each other found that the response to good news predicts relationship quality better than the response to bad news. Most of us have trained ourselves to show up in a crisis. Far fewer of us have trained ourselves to be genuinely, visibly delighted when someone tells us something wonderful.
The killer is not hostility. It’s the flat “oh, nice.” It’s the person who hears you got the job and immediately asks about the commute.
Realness
Whether you let anything show.
The polished version of you is not the likeable version of you. There’s a study by Anna Bruk and colleagues with a name I love — the beautiful mess effect. When people imagine being vulnerable themselves, they rate it as weak and messy. When they see someone else being vulnerable, they rate it as courageous and desirable. The exact same act. Two completely different verdicts, depending on which side of it you’re standing on.
Which means the thing you’re hiding because it’s embarrassing is quite possibly the thing that would make people like you.
Generosity
Whether you give, and — this is the counterintuitive half — whether you let people give to you.
Benjamin Franklin claimed that the fastest way to turn an enemy into a friend was to ask him to lend you a book. Jecker and Landy tested it properly in 1969 and found something like it holds up: people who did you a small favour ended up liking you more, not less. We like people we’ve invested in. Never asking anyone for anything feels like independence. From the outside it looks like a locked door.
Why every likeability test online is broken — including the one I used to have here
Here’s the thing that made me tear the old test off this page and start again.
Almost every likeability test on the internet traces back, directly or loosely, to one instrument: the Reysen Likability Scale, published by Stephen Reysen in 2005. It is the standard. It is well-validated. And it was never, ever designed to be filled in about yourself.
Go and read the actual items. They are written in the third person. “This person is friendly.” “This person is approachable.” “I would like to be friends with this person.” It is an other-rating scale. It measures how likeable a specific person seems to somebody who is looking at them.
Somewhere along the way, the entire internet quietly converted it into a self-report — swapped “this person is friendly” for “I am friendly” — and then presented the result to you as a measurement of your likeability. It isn’t. It’s a measurement of your self-image. Those are different things, and the distance between them is arguably the most useful information about you that exists.
My old test did this too. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
So this one gives you both halves. You take it as a self-report, because that’s a genuinely useful place to start. And then — this is the part that no other likeable person test will give you — you send a link to one person who knows you, and they answer the same items about you, the way the scale was actually built to be answered.
Their answers come back to you as a link. There is no account, no email, no server, and no database. Their six scores are encoded into the URL itself. You paste it in, and you see their profile of you laid over your own.
The gap is the point. That’s the number I’d been missing for six years.
The liking gap: you are probably more likeable than you think
Before you brace for bad news, here’s the finding you should walk in with.
In 2018, Erica Boothby and her colleagues published a study on what they called the liking gap. Strangers had conversations, then rated how much they liked the other person and how much they thought the other person liked them. Almost everyone underestimated. Consistently. People walked away thinking they’d been merely tolerated, when in fact the other person had rather enjoyed them. The effect persisted for months among people who’d just become friends.
So when the test asks you to guess your own score before you begin, it’s setting up a real comparison, and the odds are decent that your guess is too low. Mine was.
This is not a consolation prize. It’s a correction. A lot of the awkwardness that makes people less likeable is downstream of believing they’re not likeable — the over-explaining, the apologising, the leaving early. If that belief is wrong, the behaviour it produces is unnecessary.
How to be more likeable
If you want the treatment rather than the diagnosis, here is what I would actually do — and most of it is embarrassingly small.
Ask a second question. Not a new topic. A follow-up on what they just said. This is the highest-leverage social habit I know of, it takes no courage, and it separates you from almost everyone else in the room.
Respond properly to good news. When someone tells you something went well, stop, look at them, and be actively, visibly pleased. Ask them to tell you more about it. Don’t move straight to the practical implications. The practical implications are not why they told you.
Put the phone somewhere else. Not face-down on the table. Away. Face-down still says “I am waiting for something better than you.”
Say the slightly-too-honest thing. The small admission you’d normally polish out — that you were nervous, that you got it wrong, that you don’t know. You will feel like you’ve exposed yourself. They will read it as confidence.
Ask someone for a small favour. A recommendation, a lift, a borrowed thing. It feels like taking. It lands as trust.
Use their name, once, near the start. Not repeatedly, which is unnerving. Once, warmly, so they know you registered it.
Let the pause happen. The urge to fill silence is the urge to control the conversation. Sitting in it for one extra beat makes people feel heard in a way that no clever reply ever will.
And stop finishing their sentences. That one’s mine. I’m working on it.
How to read your result
The score out of 100 is the least interesting thing on the results page, and I say that as the person who built it.
What matters is the shape. A high overall score with one collapsed dimension is a very specific kind of person, and the test will tell you which kind. Two dimensions in combination often say something that neither says alone — high curiosity with low presence, for example, means you ask good questions and don’t hear the answers, which lands worse than not asking at all.
The results also show you your biggest lever: the single dimension where a realistic improvement moves your overall score the furthest, given the way you’re actually built. You can download the whole thing as a PDF, or print it.
Then send the link. Genuinely. The self-report half of this is the warm-up.
Is this a real personality test?
No, and I’d rather be straight about it than dress it up.
This is a self-assessment built on findings from social psychology, not a clinical instrument, and it hasn’t been validated as one. It won’t diagnose anything and it isn’t trying to. Being liked is also not a moral achievement, and there are people whose low scores here reflect that they’re honest in rooms where honesty is unwelcome. Read the result as a mirror, not a verdict.
What it will do is show you, quite precisely, the difference between the person you think you’re being and the person you’re landing as. Six years ago that would have saved me a lot of interrupted sentences.
If you like this kind of structured self-reflection, the wheel of life assessment does the same job across the eight areas of your life rather than your six social dimensions. And if it’s a specific relationship you want to deepen rather than your general likeability, the 36 questions to fall in love is the closest thing to a shortcut that exists — it’s built on exactly the escalating self-disclosure that the realness dimension above is measuring.
References:
- The Reysen Likability Scale: Reysen, S. (2005). Construction of a new scale: The Reysen Likability Scale. Social Behavior and Personality, 33(2), 201-208
- How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less (2000), Nicholas Boothman
- Heuristic Versus Systematic Information Processing and the Use of Source Versus Message Cues in Persuasion; Chaiken, S. & Eagly, A. H., (1983)
- The Power of Likeability, Peter Møller Jensen, 2020, Aalborg University
- Regan, D., (1971), Effects of a Favor and Liking on Compliance
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