Reaching out lands better than you predict — by half a point

Fifty-four pairs of students wrote to a classmate they had lost touch with. Senders predicted 5.57, recipients said 6.17. What the gap is, and what it is not.

Fifty-four pairs of college students, three weeks of recruiting, one small task. Each person in the first group thought of a classmate they had been friendly with and then quietly stopped talking to, and wrote them a short note. Nothing elaborate. A check-in. Then they guessed how much the note would be appreciated on a seven-point scale.

The classmates got the notes and rated them on the same scale.

Senders guessed 5.57. Recipients said 6.17. The paper puts the paired difference at 0.59 of a point, with a 95 percent confidence interval from −1.07 to −0.12 and p = .015. That is the whole finding, and I want the actual numbers up front because it gets retold badly. It does not say people are desperate to hear from you. It says both sides land high on the scale, and the sender lands a little lower.

Where the gap comes from

Peggy Liu, SoYon Rim, Lauren Min and Kate Min ran thirteen preregistered studies for this, nine main and four supplemental, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2023. The classmate study is Experiment 2. Experiment 3 repeated it with a small gift attached to the note, sixty-seven pairs this time, and the gap held: 4.25 predicted against 4.72 received, p below .001.

Their explanation is surprise, and they tested it rather than asserting it. In one paired experiment with eighty-five pairs, recipients reported being more focused on their own pleasant surprise at the message than senders imagined they would be — 4.00 against 3.62. The sender is thinking about the message. The recipient is thinking about the fact that a message arrived at all.

That reading makes a prediction, and the prediction is where the research becomes useful rather than merely nice. If surprise drives the gap, the gap should grow when the contact is more surprising and shrink when it is not.

Both held. In an experiment with 1,602 participants, the underestimation was larger for weak ties than for strong ties — and separately, a reach-out from a weak tie was rated as considerably more surprising than the identical reach-out from a close friend, an effect size of 1.27, which in this literature is enormous. In another with 1,576 participants, the researchers built a context where the message was unsurprising. The gap did not shrink. It disappeared.

So the practical shape of this is narrower than the headline. You are not systematically wrong about how your best friend receives a text. You are wrong about the person you have not spoken to in two years.

It replicated

This matters more than usual, because the effect is small and small effects in social psychology have a poor decade behind them.

Clearer Thinking ran an independent replication of Experiment 4a with 742 participants, 370 predicting and 372 responding. The original effect was d = 0.32. The replication came in at d = 0.25, statistically significant at p below .001. Smaller than the original, which is the ordinary fate of replicated effects, and clearly present.

Where I would slow down

Three things.

The effect is small. A fifth to a third of a standard deviation. On a seven-point scale it is half a point on average, and both halves of the pair are already sitting in the top third of the scale. Nobody in these studies received a note and felt indifferent. The gap is between "quite appreciated" and "slightly more appreciated than the sender assumed," and every retelling I have seen inflates it into something else.

The field experiments are small and they are students. Fifty-four pairs, sixty-seven pairs, eighty-five pairs, all on American college campuses, average age around twenty. The large samples — the ones in the thousands — are scenario studies, where people imagine a reach-out rather than experience one. The design where real people actually sent real notes to real classmates is the design with the fewest participants. That is the usual trade in this field, and it is worth knowing which numbers came from which.

And the third one is the one that stopped me. The authors ran a supplemental study, 118 participants, in which they told people about their own finding — that senders underestimate how much reach-outs are appreciated — and then gave them a window in that session to actually reach out to someone. Interest in reaching out went up a little, not significantly. Actual reaching out did not go up at all.

I keep turning that over. The whole appeal of a result like this is the implicit instruction: you are wrong about this, so go do it. The people who found the result tested that instruction and it did not work on behaviour. Knowing the number and sending the message turn out to be separate problems, and this research solves the first one.

Which is not nothing. It is just less than it sounds like.

If you want the version that survives all of the above: the person you lost touch with will be gladder to hear from you than you expect, by a modest amount, mostly because they will be more surprised than you picture them being. Reading that sentence will probably not make you send anything. Send something anyway.

Source

Peggy J. Liu, SoYon Rim, Lauren Min and Kate E. Min, "The Surprise of Reaching Out: Appreciated More Than We Think", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023, vol. 124, no. 4, pp. 754–771, doi 10.1037/pspi0000402. Figures taken from the article text and its summary tables. Replication: Clearer Thinking Transparent Replications, Report #7, a replication of Experiment 4a. Retrieved 3 September 2026.