Reading time: 2 minutes – Spotted on National Geographic
This is the fateful moment. You have just written a long message to an old acquaintance and now you have to click on the “send” button. Reconnecting with old friends is not easy: doubts, awkwardness, fear of rejection… Very often, we hesitate to take the initiative to reconnect with old comrades, as National Geographic explains.
Psychologists from Simon Fraser University (Canada) and the University of Sussex (United Kingdom) were interested in the phenomenon. This new study involved 2,500 participants whose objective was to write to a former friend. Among them, more than 90% thought of a particular friend with whom they wanted to reconnect, but only a third actually sent the message.
Lara Aknin, a psychologist at Simon Fraser University and lead researcher on the study, explains that over time, “old friends can start to feel like strangers”. This psychological distance is the main obstacle to resuming contact.
Don’t panic, solutions exist. One of them is to engage in a “warm-up.” The researchers divided the sample into two groups: the first spent three minutes writing messages to current acquaintances, the second three minutes browsing social networks.
The exercise proved conclusive: 53% of those who had “warmed up” ended up sending the message, an increase of two thirds compared to those who had not engaged in this preparatory exercise. Only 31% of participants in the “social media” group managed to jump into the deep end.
Social networks could facilitate the resumption of links
In case you’d like to contact an old friend but are hesitant, Lara Aknin points out that you’re not the only one –in fact, you are part of the majority. So the researcher suggests getting into the habit of sending messages to current friends, then changing the recipient’s name to that of someone you haven’t spoken to in a while and pressing ” send”.
“In many cases, the reason a link becomes inactive is that people move, their interests diverge and thus they lose contact with other people. But if you think about it, that’s what makes meeting someone you haven’t seen for a long time so useful and interesting.”details Giuseppe Labianca, psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (United States), who did not participate in the study.
Social networks represent another avenue. They could facilitate the resumption of so-called “dormant” links, a term used when we reconnect with an old friend for a specific reason. Social media could actually provide a baseline for greater familiarity. “People keep crossing our minds, or at least crossing our news feeds”justifies Lara Aknin, cited by National Geographic.
However, according to Giuseppe Labianca, while social networks can make it possible to stay in touch with old friends, the complete reactivation of an old link requires a real conversation: a phone call or a meeting, in order to react in real time.
Besides, your old friends will probably appreciate you getting back in touch with them more than you think. Peggy Liu, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh (United States), who was not involved in the study, notes that we tend to underestimate how much the people around us love it when we reach out to them. hand. “Surprise tends to amplify how we feel… So on the recipient’s end, when we reach out to them, those feelings of surprise really amplify their appreciation.”
