Psychology
The message you never send
We almost consistently underestimate how much other people enjoy an unexpected hello. The research on this is unusually clear, and it explains why so many messages stay in the drafts.
The thought is there, the person is in your head, the phone is in your hand. And then comes the sentence that stops everything: “I don’t want to bother them.”
That brake is so widespread that social psychology has been studying it systematically for years. The result is unusually clear for a field where plenty gets disputed: we are wrong. And almost always in the same direction.
The surprise gets underestimated
A research team led by Peggy Liu ran a series of experiments in which people reached out to someone they had not been in contact with for a while. A short message, a small gift, a phone call. Afterwards the senders estimated how pleased the recipient probably was. And the recipients reported how pleased they actually were.
The senders were consistently off. The pleasure on the other side was greater than expected. The gap was largest precisely when the contact came out of the blue, which is exactly the situation where we hesitate most.
The researchers’ explanation: whoever writes a message thinks about the content. Is it interesting enough, well phrased, appropriate? Whoever receives a message thinks about something entirely different, namely the fact that somebody thought of them. The sender judges the product, the recipient judges the gesture. And the gesture is the actual content.
The same mistake in several versions
This fits a pattern research has been finding in different forms for years.
In what is called the liking gap, people underestimate how likeable they came across after a conversation. A team led by Erica Boothby showed that this misjudgement is remarkably persistent and can last for weeks. We leave an encounter thinking it went so-so, while the other person remembers the same evening considerably more warmly.
In a well-known study by Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder, commuters were asked to strike up a conversation with a stranger on the train. Beforehand almost all of them predicted it would be unpleasant. Afterwards they reported the most enjoyable commute in a long time. Same direction again: the forecast was gloomier than reality.
And when asking for help, people likewise underestimate how readily others say yes. We brace for rejection where agreement is actually waiting.
Why we are so reliably wrong
The common thread is that we only have access to our own inside view. We know our own uncertainty in detail and see only the other person’s surface. So we assume the same critical assessment is running over there as it is in us.
On top of that sits a lopsided cost calculation. The cost of an unwelcome message is vivid and easy to picture: awkward, intrusive, badly timed. The cost of the message never sent is invisible. Nothing happens, and nothing never feels like a mistake.
What follows from this
Not that everyone should message everyone constantly. Rather that your own judgement is systematically unreliable on this one point. If you are unsure whether someone would be glad to hear from you, the statistically better bet is: yes, more than you think.
Two things help in practice.
Short is not worth less. Research finds no link between effort and pleasure. One sentence is enough. What the recipient mostly reads is what sits between the lines anyway.
No occasion is the best occasion. Everyone gets in touch on your birthday. A sign of life on an ordinary Tuesday says something a birthday message cannot, namely that no calendar was involved. Only you.
The thought was already there. All that is missing is hitting send.