You Underestimate How Much People Want to Hear From You — Julien Reszka

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A replication found recipients rate an unprompted text as more appreciated than senders expect. The gap is not caring less, it is not knowing what to say.

7% Higher average appreciation recipients reported for an unprompted reach-out than senders predicted, in a preregistered replication with 742 adults Clearer Thinking replication of Liu, P.J. et al., The Surprise of Reaching Out, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023

I default to not texting people. Not because I do not think about them, but because by the time I remember to, I do not have a reason, and a message with no reason feels like it is imposing on someone's day. So it waits, and then it waits some more, and eventually enough time has passed that reaching out at all feels strange. I suspect most people run the same loop, which is why it is worth knowing that the loop is based on a prediction error.

Researchers ran a series of preregistered experiments asking one group to predict how much an acquaintance would appreciate them reaching out, unprompted, just to check in, and asking a separate group how much they would actually appreciate that same gesture. Across the original study and an independent replication with 742 adults, the pattern held: the people receiving the message rated it as more appreciated, more grateful, more pleasing, than the people sending it had predicted. The replication found recipients rated their own appreciation about 7 percent higher than senders had guessed. The effect is not large, but it is consistently in the same direction, and it gets bigger the more surprising or out of the blue the message is.

People who reached out predicted a lower appreciation score than the people who received a message actually reported, replicated across 742 adults

The underestimation was largest for more surprising, less expected outreach, not for messages that had an obvious occasion behind them

The effect held for calls, texts, and small gifts, not just one communication channel

What this does not mean is that any message will land. "Thinking of you" with nothing behind it reads as a form letter. What the research actually shows is that people overweight the risk of a message feeling random or intrusive, and underweight how much a specific, relevant one lands. The barrier is not that reaching out is a bad bet. It is that most of us do not have something specific enough to say, so we default to nothing.

That is where the excuse usually gets misdiagnosed as an attention problem, blaming the feed for burying the people who matter under a wall of unrelated content. It is a convenient explanation, but it does not hold up well. A study of 50,000 people's actual browsing behavior found that search engines and social platforms exposed users to more politically diverse content than people got by going directly to a small set of familiar sites out of habit. Separately, a 2025 review of 129 studies on filter bubbles and echo chambers found no clear consensus that algorithms are the main driver of narrow information diets, results split heavily by how each study measured exposure. The common thread across both is that the algorithm is not the wall between you and other people's actual situations. Your own search habits are.

The fix is not complicated, it is just tedious enough that almost nobody does it consistently: look up what is actually going on in that person's specific situation before you write to them, not whatever your feed happens to be showing you that day. A new job, a move, a health scare, a project they mentioned once, any of it is enough to turn a message from a form letter into something that reads like you were paying attention. The obstacle was never a lack of care. It was the ten minutes of looking that most of us skip.

The research says the message will probably be more welcome than you expect. The only real obstacle left is having something specific enough to send.

Myth: Search engines and social feeds trap everyone in a filter bubble, only showing what confirms what they already think, which is why people lose touch with what is actually going on in someone else's life.Flaxman, S., Goel, S., Rao, J.M., Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption, Public Opinion Quarterly, 2016

“We kept finding that people underestimated how much their reach out would be appreciated, whether the gesture was as simple as checking in with a brief text message or involved sending a small gift.”Lauren Min, assistant professor of business, University of Kansas, co-author of the reaching-out study

Pick one person you have been putting off reaching out to. You do not need a reason or a big update, a short message about something specific to their situation clears the bar for appreciated.

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