When I tell friends I have written a (forthcoming) about social connection, one of the most common questions I get is about 鈥渓ost鈥� friendships. They regret that they are no longer in contact with people who were once part of their lives. Should they make the first move to get in touch, or accept that some relationships are better left in the past?
The desire to reconnect is often balanced by a fear of being rebuffed, but two recent papers have convinced me that we can all be a bit braver about reaching out.
Advertisement
comes from Peggy Liu at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and her colleagues. The team asked participants to provide the name and email address of a person with whom they hadn鈥檛 been in touch for a while. They then wrote a note to that person and answered some questions about how much they thought the friend would appreciate the gesture. The researchers forwarded the note to the named person, along with a questionnaire asking them about their feelings. Their results should be good news for anyone who wishes to reach out to their old friends: the recipients welcomed the notes far more than the authors had anticipated.
The is by Lara Aknin at Simon Fraser University in Canada and Gillian Sandstrom at the University of Sussex, UK. They found that as many as 90 per cent of people have lost touch with at least one old friend, but many are now reluctant to make the first move 鈥� even when researchers gave them the time and resources do so. Probing deeper, they found that this reticence arose from various concerns: the participants worried about what to say to rekindle the friendship, and they feared that the friend had changed and that they would no longer have the same connection.
The old friends, it seemed, had started to feel like strangers, and this led Aknin and Sandstrom to wonder whether a little practice at building new ties might give people the confidence to strengthen their older ones too. Sure enough, they found that asking people to strike up a conversation with strangers meant that they were considerably more likely to reach out to their oldest acquaintances. Our social confidence, it seems, is like a muscle 鈥� the more we use it, the stronger it becomes, and those benefits can spill over into many different contexts. We just need to have the courage to start.
I am so excited about our potential for connection that I would love to answer some of your questions about living socially in future columns. Think of me as your scientifically informed advice columnist. Let me know the social dilemmas you face at davidrobson.me/contact, and I will plumb the depths of the psychological literature for evidence-based strategies to overcome them.
David Robson is an award-winning science writer and the author of The Laws of Connection: 13 social strategies that will transform your life, out on 4 June in the US and 6 June in the UK
For other projects visit newscientist.com/maker.
