Why Getting to Know Someone Can Make You Like Them Less

You probably assume that the more you learn about someone, the more you'll like them. A 2025 Registered Report published in Royal Society Open Science found the opposite: people consistently believe they'll like someone more as they learn more about them, but the actual experience of gaining that knowledge often makes them like the person less.

The Study Nobody Saw Coming

Researchers at Prolific ran a large-scale replication of a 2007 study by Norton and colleagues, testing 801 participants. The original research, which named this pattern the "lure of ambiguity," found something unsettling: the more you know about a person, the more their specific qualities clash with what you were imagining. Ambiguity lets you project. Information destroys that projection. The 2025 replication confirmed the core pattern, finding that participants expected knowledge to increase liking (and significantly so, with effect sizes between h = 0.55 and h = 0.75), but that real-world knowledge did not reliably produce the warmth people predicted.

This isn't just a lab curiosity. Think about the last time a first date went well and a second one felt flat. Nothing dramatic happened. You just knew more. The gap between the person you imagined and the person sitting across from you quietly widened with every hour of accumulated information.

Why Your Brain Keeps Getting This Wrong

The mechanism here is a mismatch between expectation and reality that most people never consciously notice. When you know almost nothing about someone, your brain fills the blanks with favorable guesses. You project compatible values, shared humor, attractive habits. The imagined person is, by design, built from your own preferences. The real person cannot possibly compete with someone your brain constructed specifically for you.

This is part of why early-stage attraction can feel so electric and why established relationships can feel less thrilling even when nothing has gone wrong. The uncertainty is gone. Every answer you now have is one less piece of flattering projection you can hold onto. Researchers describe this as ambiguity leading to liking, while familiarity can breed contempt. The 2025 data found weak but consistent support for that original framing.

The Curiosity Escape Hatch

Here is where the research gets genuinely useful. The 2025 team extended Norton's original work by testing whether curiosity could disrupt this pattern. Their hypothesis was that curiosity mediates the relationship between gaining knowledge and liking, essentially that if you're actively curious about someone rather than passively accumulating information about them, the dynamic changes.

They found support for this. Curiosity provided an alternative path to liking. A 2024 narrative review published in Frontiers in Psychology reinforces this point directly: interpersonal curiosity, defined as a genuine desire to understand another person's inner world, builds safer relational spaces, increases feelings of closeness, and buffers against the disillusionment that ordinary information acquisition tends to produce. The difference isn't in what you learn. It's in how you're approaching the learning.

Passive information gathering is essentially auditing someone against a mental checklist. Curious engagement is something else entirely. You're not checking for flaws. You're genuinely trying to understand how this specific person sees the world. That orientation produces connection rather than comparison.

The Trap in Modern Dating

This finding maps uncomfortably well onto how people date today. Apps give you a list of facts before you meet: job, height, neighborhood, political lean, dietary preferences. You form an elaborate mental model from a grid of information points. Then the actual person walks in. The projection starts dissolving from the first few minutes.

Worse, people continue the information audit on the date itself. Rapid-fire questions about work history, family background, past relationships. It sounds like connection. It functions more like due diligence. Each answer narrows the imagined version of the person you were already warming to, and none of the answers can restore the glow of the projected version you built from their profile.

The research suggests that the quality of your curiosity matters more than the quantity of your questions. Asking someone what they do for work is auditing. Asking what part of their work makes them feel most like themselves is something different. One produces a data point. The other produces a window.

What to Actually Do

The first change is practical and specific: before a first date or early into one, notice when you shift from curiosity into assessment. The signal is usually a quiet mental verdict, a "that's a red flag" or "that doesn't match what I was expecting." When that happens, try replacing the verdict with a question. Not to be polite, but because the research suggests that genuine curiosity is the only mechanism that keeps attraction alive as ambiguity decreases.

The second change applies to long-term relationships as much as new ones. The 2024 Frontiers in Psychology review points out that interpersonal curiosity doesn't have a natural expiration date in relationships. People in established partnerships often stop being curious about each other not because there's nothing left to learn but because they've stopped expecting to be surprised. One concrete way to test this: the next time you assume you know how your partner will respond to something, ask anyway and pay attention to the answer as if you don't already know it.

Familiarity doesn't inevitably breed contempt. But the research suggests it does breed something close to indifference, unless curiosity keeps getting in the way.

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Adeyemi-Adejou, O., Greening, S. G., & Bhullar, N. (2025). Does learning more about others impact liking them? Replication and extension Registered Report of Norton et al.'s (2007) lure of ambiguity. Royal Society Open Science, 12, 250441. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.250441

Wormwood, H., Okonkwo, R., & Tarsha, M. (2024). Interpersonal curiosity as a tool to foster safe relational spaces: a narrative literature review. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1379330. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1379330

Norton, M. I., Frost, J. H., & Ariely, D. (2007). Less is more: The lure of ambiguity, or why familiarity breeds contempt. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(1), 97–105. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.1.97

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