Reluctant to reconnect with an old friend? This B.C. study might help you understand why
Have you ever wanted to rekindle an old friendship, but stopped short of actually reaching out?
If so, you're not alone – a joint-study from psychologists in B.C. and the U.K. has found many people are as hesitant to contact an old friend as they would be striking up a conversation with a total stranger.
Daunting as it can be to take the plunge, study co-author Dr. Lara Aknin, a professor at Simon Fraser University, did just that two years ago and reconnected with her friend Dr. Gillian Sandstrom at the University of Sussex.
All it took was a message on New Year’s Day.
“I reached out to Gillian and said, ‘Happy New Year, I miss you,’” Aknin said.
The two psychologists, who met years earlier as graduate students at the University of British Columbia, ultimately decided they would work on a project together – and fittingly chose to explore the ways people re-spark friendships.
What they quickly realized was many of us are stubbornly unwilling to call, text or email the people who used to play a meaningful role in our lives.
“So the project became an effort to document that, to try to understand it, and to perhaps help people overcome it,” Aknin said.
Fear of being an 'imposition'
For their research paper, the co-authors conducted a series of studies involving nearly 2,500 combined participants, with the first shedding light on how common lapsed friendships are, even among young adults.
Of the 441 university students surveyed for that initial study, just 40 of them – or about nine per cent – said they had never lost touch with an “old friend,” defined as someone they remained fond of and still cared about.
Yet the vast majority of the 91 per cent who had lost touch with someone expressed feeling either neutral or negative about the idea of reaching out, for a host of complicated reasons.
“At the top of the list was the concern, or the fear, that reaching out after all this time might be awkward, and that their friend might not be interested in hearing from them,” Aknin said.
“They were just worried that they would be an imposition in their friend’s life.”
Guilt over having drifted apart was another powerful psychological hurdle holding people back.
Dr. Lara Aknin, left, and Dr. Gillian Sandstrom met at graduate school at UBC. (Source: SFU)
Interestingly, a follow-up study found people were much more enthusiastic about the idea of an old friend contacting them out of the blue instead.
“People were way more interested in reconnection when they were imagining hearing from an old friend, which I think suggests that people are not aversive to the idea of reconnection, they just maybe don’t want to be the one to initiate it,” Aknin said.
Are old friends just strangers?
For another of the studies, 453 participants were asked to draft a message to an estranged friend as an exercise – before the researchers encouraged them to actually hit send.
Fewer than one-third of them followed through.
That was the case even though the participants “wanted to reconnect” with their friend, believed their friend “wanted to hear from them,” and had the person’s contact information, according to the paper.
Aknin and Sandstrom theorized that part of the reason for that apprehension is that, over time, we start to view old friends as strangers – and many of us are averse to approaching people we don’t know, fearing we won’t know what to say or won’t enjoy the conversation.
But contrary to those common worries, research has found even brief conversations with strangers actually tend to “boost short-term happiness," the co-authors noted.
For their last study, the psychologists used a method shown to ease those types of anxieties – a sort of "warm-up" exercise where participants spent a few minutes chatting with people they're currently close with.
Those who did were much more willing to then go out on a limb and message a long-lost friend.
“Just over 50 per cent of people who had done their warm-up activity sent the message, compared to around 30 per cent (who had not) – so that increased reaching-out rates by almost two-thirds,” Aknin said.
Friendships are among the most reliable ways we can improve our well-being, according to the psychologists, who suggested the neglected contacts who are already in our phones might be “very safe choices” for seeking out those connections.
It certainly worked out for Aknin and Sandstrom.
“We went from not talking for probably a year or two to being in contact probably once a week, on average,” Aknin said. “That was a true delight.”
Are old friends really strangers, after all? Or might they be the same people you got along with so well to begin with?
There’s only one way to find out.
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
Trump confronts repeated boos during raucous Libertarian convention speech
Donald Trump was booed repeatedly while addressing Saturday night’s Libertarian Party National Convention.
Grayson Murray, two-time PGA Tour winner, dead at 30
Two-time PGA Tour winner Grayson Murray died Saturday morning at age 30, one day after he withdrew from the Charles Schwab Cup Challenge at Colonial.
Family of toddler found dead at small-town Ont. daycare no closer to answers after year of investigation
A year has passed since two-year-old Vienna Irwin was found on the property of a home-based daycare in small-town Ontario, but her family says they are no closer to answers of what happened that day.
More seniors are using homeless shelters. Here's why, according to experts
One of the country’s homeless shelters has seen an uptick in the number of people through its doors, including more older adults over 50.
The death toll in Kharkiv attack rises to 14 as Zelenskyy warns of Russian troop movements
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Sunday that Russia is preparing to intensify its offensive along Ukraine's northern border, as the death toll rose to 14 in an aerial bomb attack on a large construction supplies store in the city of Kharkiv.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels freed over 100 war prisoners, the Red Cross says
The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen on Sunday released more than 100 war prisoners linked to the country’s long-running conflict, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.
Man or machine? Toronto company finds a way to determine how real audio clips are
The Toronto-based research arm of life sciences technology firm Klick Health has found a way to analyze voices in a manner that’s so granular, it can tell whether it's a person or an artificial intelligence-powered machine.
No sign Canada has a plan to reach NATO defence spending target: U.S. NATO ambassador
The U.S. ambassador to NATO says she has seen no indication that Canada has a plan to reach the NATO spending target of two per cent of GDP on defence.
This type of screen time has the worst effect on kids: experts
According to some experts, there is one type of screen time that is continuously excessive, and it's having a severe effect on our children.