It has happened to all of us: sitting on the couch, playing with the idea of sending an unexpected text message to an old friend, but worrying that a blue message might seem weird, intrusive, or just unwanted.
However, research suggests that these fears are unfounded, and those at the receiving end are often much more grateful than the sender might expect.
In addition, the study suggests that the more surprise a message or small gift is, the greater the appreciation the recipient feels.
“A lot of people have lost touch with others in their lives, including a lot of friends. Despite wanting to reconnect, I think a lot of people are hesitant to do that,” said Dr. Peggy Liu of the University. of Pittsburgh, the lead author of the research.
“These findings suggest that his hesitations may be out of place, as others are likely to appreciate him getting closer than people think.”
Liu said the team began their investigation because they felt many people were losing contact more and more. “We wondered why that might be,” he said.
Writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Liu and colleagues report on how they investigated the matter by conducting a series of experiments, based on hypothetical and real-life scenarios, with more than 5,900 participants. .
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In one experiment, 54 participants wrote a note to a fellow college student with whom they had not been in contact for some time. This note was emailed to the latter by the researchers, who asked both the writer and the recipient to indicate the extent to which they believed the message was appreciated.
The results show that, on average, senders rated the recipients ’appreciation with 5.57 on a seven-point scale, while the recipients themselves rated their appreciation with 6.17. The team said this and other experiments revealed that people who receive messages appreciate them much more than the sender usually expects.
Subsequent experiments suggested that the degree of this mismatch is related to how surprising the contact is. When the team conducted thought experiments in which a hypothetical message or gift was expected to be delivered, they found no difference between the sender’s view of how much it would be appreciated and that reported by those who imagined the situation as to receivers.
“One of the reasons this underestimation of appreciation occurs is that people who consider getting in touch don’t think about the positive surprise others would feel when they leave,” Liu said.
But Liu said there were still questions. “While we show that people typically underestimate how much others appreciate being contacted, it’s still a pending question how we can drive people to contact more with others,” he said.
Stephen Reicher, a professor of social psychology at St Andrews University who did not participate in the work, said the results made sense.
“Feeling connected to others has constantly been shown to be good for our physical and mental health. In fact, there is a whole new literature on what is called ‘social care’ that shows that these connections they can be remarkably effective in everything to protect themselves from depression and maintain the cognitive skills in the elderly to recover from heart attacks, ”he said, adding that The simple fact of feeling part of a group was just as effective.
Reicher suggested that Covid has stressed the need to help people connect. “If anything the pandemic has taught us is that we have a solitary pandemic that causes massive damage and we need to address it urgently as a public health issue,” he said. “Finding ways to connect people should be a priority.”