Texting a Friend You Lost Touch With: What Research Says They Feel
Across 13 preregistered experiments, people underestimated how much a reach-out is appreciated. Here is the research on dormant ties, plus six texts to copy.
In this article7 sections
Dear you, the one with a name in your phone that you scroll past,
The short version: reach out. In a series of 13 preregistered experiments with nearly 6,000 participants, Peggy Liu, SoYon Rim, Lauren Min and Kate Min found that people who initiate contact underestimate how much the recipient will appreciate it. The message you are dreading will very likely land better than you predict.
What did the research find?
The paper is “The Surprise of Reaching Out: Appreciated More Than We Think” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023, vol. 124, pp. 754-771). Participants were randomly assigned to send a reach-out or to receive one. Senders guessed low on the appreciation.
The authors’ explanation is that receivers focus on the surprise of being thought of, and surprise feeds appreciation. The gap was bigger when the context was more surprising and when the two people were more socially distant. Your long silence is part of the effect, not a strike against you.
Are you worried it will be awkward?
Probably, and that worry has a cousin. Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom and Clark (Psychological Science, 2018) documented the liking gap: after conversations, people underestimated how much their partners liked them. It showed up with lab strangers, first-year dorm mates and workshop attendees.
The two findings are different measures, so I will not stretch either one. Still, they point the same direction. You are a poor judge of how you come across, and the judgment errs on the gloomy side.
Can an old contact actually help you?
Levin, Walter and Murnighan (Organization Science, 2011) had Executive MBA students reconnect with dormant ties, former contacts they had lost touch with, for advice on a work project. Those contacts compared well with current ones, and reviving them gave benefits normally split between weak ties (fresh information) and strong ties (trust). That study was about work advice, so treat it as evidence that old ties keep their value, not as a friendship guarantee.
What should you send?
Keep it short, specific and free of a required answer. Copy one, change a detail, send.
- “I saw [a specific thing] and thought of you. No need to reply, I just wanted you to know.”
- “You crossed my mind this morning. How are you doing these days?”
- “I found the photo from [event]. Still laughing. Hope you’re well.”
- “It has been too long and that is on me. I would love to hear what your life looks like now.”
- “Your [song, dish, joke] came up today. Say hi to [name of their partner, dog or kid] for me.”
- “I am not asking for anything. I miss talking to you.”
A few notes on using them. Send in the daytime, when a reply costs nothing. Name one real detail, because a detail shows the message was meant for one person and not copied to a list. If you get a warm answer, reply within a day or two, then offer one concrete, small plan: a 20-minute call on a named evening beats an open invitation.
What should you skip?
Skip the apology essay, since a one-line acknowledgment does the job. Skip “we should catch up soon,” which asks them to do the planning (see why that phrase quietly kills friendships). Skip questions that require a long answer, and skip checking whether they posted recently, which turns a kind gesture into surveillance.
Also skip waiting for a good reason. The studies did not require one.
When should you do it?
Pick a fixed, protected slot. Ten minutes, once a week, same day, same place: Sunday at 9:30 with coffee, say. Bring the list of three names. Send one message, then close the phone. Without the slot, the message competes with everything else and loses. The year-of-yes rule for friend invitations makes a similar bet on removing the decision.
An alarm can protect the slot too. DontSnooze is a wake-up app: you record a video within 30 seconds of the alarm, or a random camera-roll photo goes to friends you chose (details in how it works). It will get you to the coffee. It does not write, send or nag about the text, and that part stays yours.
One last thing
Start with the name you skipped this morning. The worst realistic outcome is a slow reply. The likelier one is a person somewhere reading your message on a Tuesday and feeling remembered.
Yours in advance, the blog
The same overestimate of how closely other people are watching shows up in a famous T-shirt experiment on the spotlight effect.