Calling,
texting, or emailing a friend just to say “hello” might seem like an
insignificant gesture — a chore, even, that is not worth the effort. Or maybe
you worry an unexpected check-in would not be welcome, as busy as we all tend
to be.
اضافة اعلان
But new research
suggests that casually reaching out to people in our social circles means more
than we realize.
“Even sending a
brief message reaching out to check in on someone, just to say ‘Hi,’ that you
are thinking of them, and to ask how they’re doing, can be appreciated more
than people think,” said Peggy Liu, Ben L. Fryrear Chair in Marketing and an
associate professor of business administration with the
University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business.
Liu is the lead
author of a new study — published recently in The Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology — that found people tend to underestimate how much friends
like hearing from them.
She and her team
ran a series of 13 experiments, involving more than 5,900 participants, to get
a sense of how good people are at guessing how much friends value being reached
out to, and what kinds of interactions are the most powerful.
In some of the
experiments, participants reached out to someone they considered to be a
friend; in others, they got in touch with someone they were friendly with but
considered a weak tie.
Those reaching out
were asked to rate how appreciative, happy, pleased, and grateful they
anticipated the contact would be to hear from them — from not at all to very
much.
The researchers
then asked those on the receiving end of the check-in to rate how much they
appreciated the contact.
Across all 13
experiments, those who initiated contact significantly underestimated how much
it would be appreciated.
The more
surprising check-ins (from those who have not been in contact recently) tended
to be especially powerful.
Liu and her fellow
researchers kept the bar for what counted as reaching out intentionally low: a
brief call, text or email, or a small gift, like cookies or a plant.
(The researchers
did not focus on social media interactions in the study, but Liu said there was
no reason to hypothesize that reaching out to someone on Facebook or Instagram
would be any less meaningful.)
And the fact that
these quick, simple check-ins were meaningful will hopefully encourage people
to reach out to their social contacts more often “just because,” the
researchers said.
Across all 13 experiments, those who initiated contact significantly underestimated how much it would be appreciated.
Theirs is not the
only recent research to emphasize the power of small moments of connection.
Another study, published in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, found
that having positive social interactions is linked with a sense of
purposefulness in older adults. It adds to the growing body of research that
suggests the people we spend time with daily have a “very large impact” on our
well-being, said Gabrielle Pfund, a postdoctoral researcher in the department
of medical social sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of
Medicine and a researcher on that study. (At the time of the study, Pfund was
working with a team at Washington University in St. Louis.)
Yet the new
studies come at a challenging time for friendship and connection in the US,
which is in the throes of a loneliness crisis that has grown more complicated —
and more acute — during the pandemic.
People also tend
to be hard-wired to assume our friends and acquaintances will not be as open to
us as we would like, said Marisa Franco, a psychologist and assistant clinical
professor at the University of Maryland and author of the forthcoming book
“Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends.”
She noted that
many people feel awkward about reaching out due to a phenomenon known as the
“liking gap,” or the tendency to underestimate how well-liked we really are.
People may also hold themselves back because of a similar phenomenon known as
the “beautiful mess effect,” which suggests that when we are vulnerable with
others, we worry we will be judged harshly. That kind of negativity bias tends
to run through all aspects of friendship, Franco said, and can have a tangible
effect on how we behave and interact.
But friendship
experts such as Franco say they hope the findings will underscore the need to
connect with others on a daily basis, and encourage people to see friendship as
an important component of personal health, even if reaching out sometimes feels
awkward or time-consuming.
“To be functioning at our
best, we need to be in a connected state,” she said. “Just like you need to
eat, like you need to drink, you need to be connected to be functioning well.”
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