Someone Has a Crush on You — Type Your Name to See Who

The unglamorous answer, stated up front

This page cannot see anybody. It has no access to your classmates, your colleagues, or the person who keeps replying to your stories within ninety seconds. It knows a name you typed into a box. Whatever comes back is a description of a type, and the only genuine signal in the whole exercise is whose face turned up in your mind while you were reading it.

You are almost certainly better liked than you think

There is a well-replicated finding here that ought to be far more famous. Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark documented what they named the liking gap: after a conversation, people systematically underestimate how much the other person enjoyed it and how much they were liked. It showed up among strangers paired in a laboratory, among students who had just moved into halls, and it persisted between flatmates for months instead of fading once the first awkward week was over.

The proposed explanation is that you have a front-row seat for your own fumbles and none whatsoever for theirs. You replay the moment you talked over them; they were busy replaying something of their own. So the premise that somebody has been thinking about you more than they have let on is, statistically speaking, not a wild premise.

But reading interest accurately is genuinely hard

The other half of the research is less flattering. Studies of perceived romantic interest keep finding sizeable and patterned errors: men more often mistake ordinary friendliness for attraction, women more often miss interest that is really there. Martie Haselton and David Buss framed this through error management theory, arguing that where the two possible mistakes carry different costs, judgement drifts towards whichever error is cheaper to make. Neither tendency is a skill. Both generate a great deal of avoidable confusion.

The only dependable way to find out

Liking is strongly reciprocal. Discovering that somebody likes you tends to make you like them back, which is among the sturdier findings in social psychology and also the engine behind most crushes that go anywhere at all. Reciprocity does need a first move, though, and one clear enough to be answered.

That need not mean a grand declaration. It means a single legible signal rather than six ambiguous ones: a direct invitation, a specific compliment, a question that cannot be met with a shrug. This quiz cannot tell you who is interested. A plainly worded message, sent on a Thursday, very often can.

How this one works: the name you type is turned into a number, and that number picks one of the outcomes below. It is a party trick rather than a reading — the fun is in which one you land on, not in it being true.