Why Do We Skip the Thank-You Message We Know We Owe a Friend?

“People don’t seem to walk around in their day-to-day lives giving thanks to people all that often,” said Amit Kumar, then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, when his study with Nicholas Epley came out in 2018. The paper explains why. Most of us have a friend we are grateful to and have never told, and the reason is a forecasting error rather than a lack of feeling.

The error is specific. In Psychological Science (2018, volume 29, issue 9, pages 1423-1435), Kumar and Epley asked people to write a gratitude letter, predict how the recipient would react, and then compared those predictions with what recipients reported. Writers underestimated how surprised and happy recipients would be, and overestimated how awkward they would feel.

What did Kumar and Epley actually find?

The paper is titled “Undervaluing Gratitude: Expressers Misunderstand the Consequences of Showing Appreciation.” Four experiments tested it.

In the first two, participants wrote letters and forecast how recipients would feel on three dimensions: happy, awkward and surprised. Recipients then rated their real reactions on the same measures. Recipients felt more surprise and delight than writers expected, and less awkwardness.

The second pair of experiments looked at behavior rather than feelings. Participants thought about several people they were grateful to, predicted each person’s reaction, and ranked how likely they were to write to each. They were more inclined to write to people they expected to react well, and less inclined to write to people they expected to feel most awkward. The misjudged awkwardness was doing real work: it decided who got a letter and who did not.

Why do we get the forecast wrong?

The authors point to a pair of perspective problems. Writers focus on how skillfully they are expressing themselves, which makes the task feel like a performance. Recipients focus on the warmth, and the warmth is what they respond to.

In a final study, writers rated how competent (articulate, well worded) and how warm (sincere) the recipient would find them. They underestimated both, and the largest miss was on competence. Kumar summarized the barrier this way: “thoughts about how competently people can express their gratitude may be a barrier.”

There is also a content gap. Writers underestimated how surprised recipients would be by the reasons they were grateful. A thing you have always known about a friend’s effect on you can still be news to the friend.

What does this change about friendship?

It changes the cost-benefit math you run in your head before sending anything. If the forecast is biased toward awkwardness, then the hesitation you feel is poor evidence about what will happen.

This sits next to other forecasting errors in friendship research. The reaching-out research shows people also misjudge how a surprise message from an old friend will land. Both point the same direction: the friend on the other end is usually more glad to hear from you than you assumed.

One limit to keep in view. The studies measured reactions to a single letter soon after it arrived. They did not follow friendships for months, so the claim is about the first reaction, not about lasting closeness.

What can you do this weekend?

A short plan, since a vague intention is exactly the thing the study says we fail at.

1. Saturday morning, pick one person. Choose a friend who changed something for you: a job tip, a hard week they sat through, a move they helped with. Name the specific thing.
2. Write it in a few sentences. State what they did and what it led to. Skip editing for style, since competence was the part writers overweighted.
3. Say something they may not know. The surprise finding suggests the reason is the valuable part, so give the reason, not just “thanks for everything.”
4. Send it before Sunday evening. Text, voice note or paper all work as a vehicle for the same warmth, though only letters were tested.
5. Set the next one. Put a recurring Saturday slot in your calendar, the same way standing plans keep a friendship from depending on someone’s mood.

Why does a witness help here?

Gratitude is easy to postpone because nobody notices if you do. The same is true of mornings. Some people use DontSnooze because friends see the proof that they got up, which turns a private intention into a daily action that someone else can check. A Saturday thank-you works the same way if you tell one person you will send it, or copy a friend on the plan. The earlier piece on being watched when you wake up covers why an audience, even a small one, changes follow-through.

The takeaway from Kumar and Epley is modest and useful: the message you are hesitating over will probably land better than you think, so the awkwardness you imagine is the least reliable part of the plan.

Once the message is sent, a shared first-time activity is the natural next step, and self-expansion theory says why it tends to bring people closer.

Another cheap act with experimental backing is spending a few dollars on someone else, covered in the Dunn, Aknin and Norton envelope study.