20 Jul How To Drop Your Hesitations About Randomly Reaching Out To a Friend—Because Research Says They’ll Appreciate It
One of my mottos in life is that happiness isn’t just feeling good, it’s also doing good.
Happy people AREN’T selfish; they’re more caring and compassionate and helpful.
So reaching out to help others will obviously be good for them, but it’ll also be good for you. And here’s how you can overcome some hesitations you might have to do so more often …
via Well and Good by Erica Sloan
Whether because of the collective trauma or the unprecedented-ness of it all, the pandemic has been a total time warp. One day, it was 2019, and just like that, it’s three years later—and many of us are still reeling. During those pandemic fugue years, you might have lost touch with some friends, and maybe you’re eager to get back in touch with them now. Or, perhaps you’re looking to deepen your relationships with your current friends but struggling to do so without being…awkward? The good news is simply reaching out randomly could help in both cases.
In a study published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found, through a series of experiments involving more than 5,900 participants, that people categorically underestimate how much an “out of the blue” or “just because” reach-out to a friend is appreciated.
In one experiment, when half the participants were asked to recall a time when they reached out to a friend, and the other half were encouraged to remember a time when they were reached out to, the first group’s ranking of how much they assumed their gesture was appreciated was significantly lower than the second group’s ranking of how much they actually appreciated being contacted.
When the researchers played out this relationship directly in a separate experiment, in which folks sent a note or small gift to a friend and then rated how grateful they expected the recipient would be, the recipients’ self-reported levels of gratefulness for the message or gift were significantly higher than what the initiators predicted.
Basically, people love it when they hear from a friend unexpectedly—but when we’re the friend considering making that outreach, we underestimate how much the person will appreciate it.
Why do we tend to underestimate how much a friend will appreciate us randomly reaching out?
To figure out the reason for this discrepancy between how people think a friend will respond to a “just because” reach-out and how they actually do, the researchers looked at what each group of people was considering while making their assessments…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE