Many friends lose touch with each other over time. Be it because you are moving to a new city, don’t have enough time or – as in recent years – a pandemic is forcing you to keep your distance. A guilty conscience often prevails, and it is better not to contact us at all than to risk a disappointing answer. But this fear is often unfounded, as a series of experiments by a team led by Peggy Liu from the University of Pittsburgh suggests. In nine experiments with almost 5,000 subjects, a pattern was repeated: people underestimate how happy friends and acquaintances are when you get in touch with them. The researchers have now presented their results in the journal “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology”.
In some experiments, the subjects were asked to send a short message or a small gift to friends or casual acquaintances and to rate how happy the recipient would be about this gesture. They, in turn, indicated how much they valued the establishment of contact. In other experiments, the participants were asked to mentally put themselves in one of the two roles for the assessment.
The effect was greater the more surprising the contact was, for example if it was more of a casual acquaintance than a deep friendship. If the message was entirely to be expected – such as in the context of a mentoring program – the senders assessed the reaction of the recipients more correctly. The researchers believe that people do not put themselves in the addressee’s shoes when they are wondering whether they should get in touch again. Accordingly, they do not calculate the positive surprise effect.