Think back to almost the last message you sent. That old friend you’ve been meaning to get in touch with for years. A colleague you are considering signing up for during a difficult time. It’s almost like your relative called and then didn’t. In most cases, something stopped you. And whatever it was, it was almost a matter of imagining how your reaching out would be received.
When people are asked to name a specific fear, the word that comes up: intrusion. New research shows that fear is almost always wrong about the other person.
Hesitation and what it is
Stretching after silence requires a little imagination. When your message arrives, you need to imagine the other party’s reaction—whether your connection will be welcome, or if the space is too long for the gesture to land well. And when you can’t be sure where you stand with someone or how important you are to them, the imagination tends to be cautious.
People share the same hesitations in these moments. I don’t want to bother them. They are probably busy. It’s been a long time and that would be weird. The silence lasted so long that breaking it would be like making a statement. For some people, the concern is more specific: what if they don’t remember me as fondly as I remember them?
What all these hesitations have in common is that they originate entirely from within. The perceived awkwardness is entrepreneurial. Projected anxiety – interference – is collected without any actual signal from the recipient of the message. It’s a story about someone else’s reaction, written by someone who didn’t ask them.
What the study found
A group of behavioral scientists led by him Peggy J. Liu, Ph.D.The University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business set out to test how accurate people are at predicting how well their ads will be rated. The study, published in July 2022 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, involved more than 5,900 participants in multiple experiments, including field studies in which participants contacted real-life acquaintances via text, email, and phone. Not strangers. People they really know.
The results were consistent across all versions of the experiment. “Our research shows that people significantly underestimate how much others will value communication,” Liu said. Relationship initiates consistently predicted that their gesture would be less warm than recipients reported. Whether the message was a short message, a longer note, or a small gift, the gap appeared. It appeared in close relationships and more distant relationships. And in particular, the effect strengthened as social distance increased: the more time passed or the further apart two people were, the less the initiator rated how much the other person would value staying in touch.
Why is there a gap?
Researchers have identified a specific mechanism. as Liu explained: “We found that receivers of communication paid more attention to the element of surprise than those who initiated communication, and this increased attention to surprise was associated with higher evaluation.”
In other words, unpredictability—what initiates fear reading as strange or intrusive—is what tends to make the gesture feel meaningful to the recipient. The initiator negotiates whether or not to send the message. From where they stood, the act lost its spontaneity. But to the buyer, it comes as an unexpected signal: someone thought of them and acted when they had no special obligation to do so. It tends to feel significantly better than the initiate anticipated.
The study also found that the more surprising the context—the longer the gap, the weaker the existing bond between the two people—the greater the appreciation for the receiving party. The seemingly hardest cases to begin with are the strongest positive responders.
A message you didn’t send
In explaining her response to these findings, Liu offered something unusually honest: “I sometimes pause before reaching out to people in my pre-pandemic social circle for a variety of reasons. When that happens, I think about these research findings and remind myself that other people may be hesitant to reach out to me for the same reasons. Then I tell myself that if they reach out to me, they won’t get much. They wouldn’t appreciate me reaching out to them in the same way.”
This is a useful change in the framework. The fear of interference is actually a projection—the assumption that the other person will experience the way you sent your message. With all the uncertainty, the second-guessing, knowing that this could land awkwardly. The research shows that projection is almost systematically turned off. What seems risky on the one hand, feels like warmth on the other.
None of this means that every attempt to reconnect will go smoothly. Context matters, the history of the relationship matters, and there are real situations where silence is the right response. Findings come from experimental settings, and real-world relationships carry implications that one study cannot fully capture. But for the categories of situations that most people actually think about—the person you’ve been meaning to contact for months, the old friend you’ve been thinking about but haven’t texted, the coworker you’ve lost touch with—the main obstacle seems to be fear in the imagination of the person who hasn’t texted yet.
According to reports, the other person is more likely to feel something completely different when they come.
