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 (N = 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 th...
