An old message thread can remain on a phone for years without becoming a broken relationship.

There may have been no argument and no decision to lose touch. One conversation simply became the last one. Reopening it can feel oddly difficult because the sender has to cross the accumulated silence without knowing how the arrival will be read.

A paper led by Peggy Liu suggests that senders are often too pessimistic about that reception. In one field experiment, university students wrote a short note to somebody they knew but had not spoken to for a while. The recipients appreciated the note more than the senders predicted.

The result comes from one experiment inside a larger research programme, not a rule about every old friendship. The gap was also more modest than the phrase “far more” in the headline might imply.

The field experiment used real messages

The 2023 paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was called “The Surprise of Reaching Out: Appreciated More Than We Think”. Its second experiment moved beyond asking people to remember or imagine an interaction.

Researchers recruited students on a US college campus and asked each person to identify another student in their social circle. The pair should usually have pleasant encounters and know each other to some extent, but should not have interacted online or in person for a while.

The initiating students wrote a short note to “check in and say hello”. Before it was delivered, they predicted on a seven-point scale how much the other person would appreciate receiving it. The researchers then emailed the named recipients, showed them the note and asked how much they actually appreciated it.

The final analysis included 54 complete pairs. Senders predicted an average appreciation score of 5.57. Recipients reported 6.17. The standardised difference was modest, at 0.34, but the direction was clear: the note landed better than its writer expected.

There is an important limitation in those 54 pairs. The researchers had 100 valid initiators, meaning only 54% of the invited recipients completed the survey. Their exploratory checks did not identify systematic differences between retained and lost pairs on the characteristics they measured, but unmeasured differences may remain.

The note was one test inside a much larger paper

The title describes “a study”, but the published paper reported 13 preregistered experiments involving nearly 6,000 participants. The designs included recalled experiences, three field experiments with real acquaintances and controlled scenarios.

Some participants sent notes. Others sent a note with a small gift, such as biscuits, coffee or a plant. Later experiments compared weaker and stronger social ties, and expected with unexpected contact.

Across these designs, initiators repeatedly underestimated how much recipients would appreciate the outreach. The pattern appeared in student and online adult samples, with both messages and small gifts.

An independent preregistered replication later repeated one of the paper’s scenario experiments with a larger sample. It reproduced the main result with an effect size of 0.25, again small but consistent with the original direction.

The replication team also noted a wording problem. The original paper described that particular scenario as a “brief message”, although the scenario itself did not specify the form or content of the contact. That issue does not apply to the field experiment above, where students did write actual short notes, but it is a useful reminder to keep the experiments distinct.

Surprise appears to carry part of the value

The researchers proposed that senders and recipients focus on different parts of the same event.

Recipients paid more attention to the pleasant surprise of being contacted. Senders were less likely to include that surprise when forecasting the response. In two experiments, the difference in attention to surprise statistically helped account for the appreciation gap.

A later experiment tested the idea more directly with 1,576 US adults in the final analysis. Participants imagined either sending or receiving a note and a small bag of cookies. In the surprising condition, the contact arrived simply because one person had been thinking about the other. In the unsurprising condition, both people belonged to a programme where such contact was expected.

The appreciation gap appeared in the surprising condition and disappeared in the expected one. Another experiment found it was larger for weaker social ties than for strong ones, consistent with contact from a more distant acquaintance being less predictable.

Surprise is therefore more than decoration around the result. The unprompted timing seems to be part of what the recipient values.

The sender and recipient are evaluating different objects

A sender can become absorbed in the quality of the message. Is it awkward? Has too much time passed? Does “I was thinking of you” sound sincere after eighteen silent months? The object under review becomes the sender’s performance.

The recipient receives that wording, but also receives evidence that they existed in another person’s mind without having to ask. The message may be ordinary while the fact of its arrival is not.

Separate research by Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found a similar mismatch around gratitude. Across three experiments, people wrote letters of thanks and predicted recipients’ reactions. Writers underestimated how positive and surprised recipients would feel while overestimating awkwardness.

The two papers study different acts. Gratitude names a benefit already received, while a check-in can contain almost no information. What they share is a perspective problem: the sender attends to the adequacy of the expression, while the recipient has access to the warmth conveyed by it.

A short note does not have to carry the whole friendship

I have written before about small talk as a signal of goodwill rather than a failed exchange of information. A brief message can serve a similar social function.

Its job may be smaller than the sender imagines. It need not explain every silent month, restore the old level of closeness or produce an immediate plan. “This made me think of you” already tells the recipient something that was not visible before.

That does not make every old connection suitable for reopening. The field experiment asked people to contact somebody with whom they had previously had pleasant interactions. It offers little evidence about estrangement, unresolved harm, unwanted pursuit or a relationship in which silence was a deliberate boundary.

Nor did the research show that reading about the effect reliably makes people reconnect. In a supplemental experiment, informing participants about the findings produced only a non-significant trend in interest and no significant increase in actual outreach during the short window the researchers provided.

The silence looks different from either side

The sender sees an interruption to a long absence. They feel the asymmetry of making the first move and the risk that the gap will be interpreted as indifference.

The recipient can see something else: a small piece of unrequested evidence that the relationship, however quiet, had not vanished entirely from another person’s attention.

The message carries both meanings. The research suggests that senders calculate the first with care and regularly miss some of the second.