We often fear that long-lost friends wouldn’t want to hear from us or that reaching out would be awkward. Now, scientists have come up with an approach to ease our anxieties around making contact.
“People aren’t averse to the idea of reconnection, they’re just worried about the risk of doing it,” says at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. “They don’t want to be the one who sticks their neck out to initiate this contact.”
Two years ago, Aknin had been missing her college friend , who works at the University of Sussex in the UK, and decided to reach out. What began as a new year’s greeting turned into a seven-study project about reigniting friendships.
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The pair ran a series of online surveys on more than 2500 people, mostly undergraduate students and young adults, in Canada and the UK.
In one of the studies, 91 per cent of the participants reported having fallen out of touch with a friend. Most said they would be happy to be contacted by a long-lost friend, but had little interest in reaching out themselves.
When given the time to contact such a friend, fewer than a third of the participants actually sent a message, even when they wanted to do it and assumed the person would appreciate hearing from them.
In general, people were about as willing to reach out to long-lost friends as they were to talk to a stranger – which they deemed as appealing as taking out the garbage.
at the University of Oxford, who wasn’t involved in the study, says that friendships are strongly based on sharing as many of the “seven pillars” as possible – a common language or dialect, home region, career path, hobbies or interests, world views, musical tastes and sense of humour.
“When we are with friends, we tend to converge our interests, but if we don’t see them for a long time, we drift apart on the seven pillars,” he says.
To help people overcome their anxieties about reaching out to long-lost friends, Aknin and Sandstrom asked 101 participants to spend 3 minutes sending messages to close friends and then another 2 minutes drafting a message to a friend they had lost touch with.
These participants were two-thirds more likely to actually send the second message than another group of individuals who hadn’t messaged a close friend first, but instead scrolled through social media.
“Giving people this tool – this warm-up activity – could hopefully encourage many more people to reach out and enjoy the emotional and social benefits that come from doing so,” says Aknin. “Many of them were just over the moon about this reconnection that had happened.”
Communications Psychology
