---
title: "Why Old Friends Appreciate Hearing From You"
description: "Reaching out is appreciated more than senders expect. The research on why it still feels hard, and what actually makes people send the message."
slug: "reaching-out-appreciation-research"
publishedAt: "2026-07-16"
updatedAt: "2026-07-16"
keywords:
- reaching out to old friends
- should i text an old friend
- people appreciate hearing from you
- liking gap
- reconnecting with friends psychology
- how to reconnect with an old friend
- losing touch with friends
- reach out appreciation research
tags:
- psychology
- mood
---
Think about the last time someone you had lost touch with turned up in your notifications for no reason at all. No birthday, no news, no occasion. Just a message saying they had thought of you.
You probably remember how good it landed, and how out of proportion that felt to the two lines it took. Here is the strange part: you almost certainly do not credit yourself with being able to do that for someone else. You have already run the experiment on yourself, and you still do not believe the result.
## What the Reaching-Out Research Found
The most thorough test of this is a 2023 paper in the *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology* by Peggy Liu and colleagues, built from thirteen preregistered studies. The design: put people in the position of the initiator reaching out, or the responder being reached out to, and compare what the initiator predicts against what the responder reports.
The initiators were wrong in the same direction almost every time. People consistently underestimated how much the person on the other end appreciated hearing from them, whether the gesture was a note, a small gift, or just a message.
That fits a pattern researchers had already named. In 2018, Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom, and Margaret Clark documented the **liking gap**: after a conversation, people reliably underestimate how much the other person liked them and enjoyed their company. We carry a quietly pessimistic read on our own reception. Reaching out is that same misread, pointed at someone we already know.
Two things keep this honest. The gaps are modest, roughly a third to two-thirds of a point on five- and seven-point scales, a reliable tilt rather than a revelation. And the authors hedge the mechanism: the responder seems focused on the pleasant surprise of the contact in a way the sender never factors in, but they call that evidence compatible with the account, not proof.
The gap also got wider the further apart two people were. It showed up between close friends and between [the acquaintances at the edges of your life](/blog/weak-ties-research), but it was bigger at the edges. The less current you are with someone, the more you underestimate what a message from you is worth.
## Does Knowing This Make You Send the Message?
In 2024, Lara Aknin and Gillian Sandstrom published a paper in *Communications Psychology* with a title that reads like a confession: "People are surprisingly hesitant to reach out to old friends." Across seven studies they stacked the deck as far toward sending as they could. Participants wanted to reach out. They thought the friend would be appreciative. They had the contact information. They were given time to draft and send the message, right there.
Fewer than one third of them sent it.
That dismantles the tidy version of this story. These people already believed their message would be welcome, and still did not move. Knowing the research is not the missing piece.
## Why an Old Friend Can Feel Like a Stranger
Their explanation is quietly forgiving. People were no more willing to reach out to an old friend than to strike up a conversation with a total stranger, and the more a given old friend felt like a stranger, the less willing people were to contact them.
That is what the hesitation actually is. Not indifference, not a character flaw. Time did something to the connection while you were not looking, and a person you genuinely love came to sit roughly where a stranger sits. You are not avoiding your friend. You are facing an opening move.
Which is also why the fix works. Sandstrom is one of the researchers behind the work on [how much better talking to strangers goes than we expect](/blog/weak-ties-research), so in their final study they took an intervention built to ease anxiety about strangers, pointed it at old friends instead, and increased the number of people who actually reached out by two-thirds. The barrier is real, and it moves.
## What This Research Does Not Say
Two honest limits, because they change what you take from this.
- **It does not promise the message will make you happier.** Liu's studies measured how much the recipient appreciated it, never how the sender felt afterward. That [a kind message tends to lift both people](/blog/emotional-contagion) is a real finding, it just is not this one.
- **The liking gap itself is not the thing to fix.** A 2025 study of more than 2,700 people found neither the real gap nor the perceived one was reliably tied to how good people's interactions actually were, and the original liking-gap work never claimed closing it fixes anything. What did track well was simpler: [feeling liked, and feeling like you matter to someone](/blog/mattering-research). Your message hands the other person exactly that.
## How to Make It Easy on Yourself
The research points at lowering the cost of the opening move, not at trying harder:
- **Send it to the person who feels furthest away.** That is where the underestimation is largest, and where your instinct is least trustworthy.
- **Do not explain the gap.** "It has been too long" is the story you are telling yourself, not the one they are waiting for.
- **Let the message be ordinary.** The bar is a message, not a reunion, and it does not need to be worthy of the silence. [Small and repeatable is how this kind of thing works](/blog/daily-kindness-wellbeing).
- **Expect it to feel like an opening move.** It will feel like approaching a stranger, because that is roughly what your brain has filed them as. That feeling is not a verdict on the friendship.
## Reaching Out, with Positive
The Positive app hands you the opener. One handpicked quote a day, and any of them is one tap from the person it reminded you of. There is no blank page to stare at and no explaining why you went quiet, because the quote is the whole message and "this made me think of you" is the whole note. A daily reminder keeps a good line in front of you, so the moment someone crosses your mind, the thing to send is already in your hand. No accounts, no ads if you go Premium, and it is free to download.
The message you keep not sending is almost never the imposition you think it is. Ask the version of you who once received one.
## Sources
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, The Surprise of Reaching Out: Appreciated More Than We Think (Liu, Rim, Min, and Min, 2023)
- Communications Psychology, People Are Surprisingly Hesitant to Reach Out to Old Friends (Aknin and Sandstrom, 2024)
- Psychological Science, The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think? (Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom, and Clark, 2018)
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Evaluating the Psychological and Social Nature of Actual and Perceived Liking Gaps (Tissera, Elsaadawy, Cooney, Human, and Carlson, 2025)