> Specifically, they wanted to see if over time, your roommate was more likely to begin to see you the way you see yourself. The answer was yes: so long as you have lived together for a minimum of nine months. It takes that long for perceptions to even begin to get in sync. And even then, the correlations between how college students saw themselves and how their roommates saw them were surprisingly low, in the .2-.5 range (remember, 1 would be a perfect correlation).<p>In my native language this fact is recognized with a saying "You'll eat barrel of salt before you know a man." meaning it takes so long that even though you don't consume much salt daily you'll eventually consume a barrel sooner than you get to know a man.<p>Poles are perceived as distrusting towards people that are not our closes friends. I guess we are just realistic and reserved towards unknown.