The Science of Rekindling Old Connections
Newsletter 010
Dear Writer,
Have you ever hesitated to initiate contact with an old friend with whom you’ve lost touch? If so, then you (like me) are in the vast majority of people according to a new study by psychologists from Canada and the UK:
Amongst the 2,500 participants, 90% could think of a specific friend with whom they had lost touch and wanted to connect with again, but only one-third of the participants actually sent their friend a message.
When the researchers asked participants to rate their willingness to do certain tasks – 1) messaging an out-of-touch friend, 2) talking to a stranger, 3) eating an ice cream bar, and 4) picking up a bag of garbage – they were equally willing to reach out to an old friend, to start a conversation with a stranger, or to pick up a bag of garbage.
As a final effort to inspire outreach, the researchers showed the participants findings from a study about how friends appreciate the outreach much more than we think. Nevertheless the number of participants who sent messages remained low.
“Instead of changing people’s minds, we really tried to change their behavior,” says Lara Aknin, the lead researcher and psychologist.
The new behavior-based approach? A “warm-up”: One group spent three minutes drafting a written message to their friend, while another spent three minutes browsing their own social media feeds. The practice was a success: 53% of those who “warmed up” with a draft message decided to re-initiate contact compared to only 31% of those who browsed social media.
“Over time, old friends can start to feel like strangers,” explains Aknin. The main reported hurdles to reconnection? Psychological distance.
Enter social media (surprise!). While social media can facilitate connections with old ties, it can also keep those connections surface-level and passive. “People are still crossing our minds, or at least crossing our feeds,” says Aknin.
To fully reactivate our dormant ties requires a real conversation, according to Giuseppe Labianca, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“People fear that the other person is going to not want to reconnect," says Labianca. “Most of this is in our own heads, and if you did reach out, you’d be surprised by how excited people would be to reconnect.”
“Surprise tends to amplify how we feel,” adds Peggy Liu, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh and author of the 2023 study “The Surprise of Reaching Out.” “On the recipient end, when they’re reached out to, those feelings of surprise really amplify that appreciation.”
The science leads us to art. Specifically, the art of conversation finds imaginative form in Switch-Lit’s turn-based approach to collaborative prose and poetry.
💖 Give the aliveness of surprise to an old friend with a unique invitation into a parallel world of fiction.
🔥 Take three minutes to warm up with a Switch-Lit story proposal and hit “send”.
🙃 You might be surprised by what happens next.
– Ken
S••L Editor
Featured prompt:
Prompt 5
In the city of Disco, the inhabitants all lived in glass-wall houses with a mirrorball in every room. Looking into each mirrorball gave them the power to see and become another version of themselves.
by Switch-Lit
Did you know?
The Maison de Verre is Paris’s most radical residence. Bathed in sunlight during the day and lit at night with a phosphorescent lantern glow, it resembles a box made of glass blocks but capped by a single traditional apartment. Commissioned in the late 1920s by a gynecologist Jean Dalsace, he was determined to reinvent an old hotel into a Modernist mansion. However, the top-floor tenant refused to move, so he built around her.
Labyrinthine and airy, the glass house is a series of interlocking forms, with the doctor’s office on the first floor, two private levels above, and one willful tenant on the top floor.
Don’t give up.
Hey, Bob I'm lookin' at what, uh, Jack was talkin' about
And, uh, it's definitely not a particle that's nearby
It is a, uh, bright object
And it's, uh, obviously rotating because it's flashing
It's, uh, way out in the distance
Currently rotating in a very rhythmic fashion
Because the, uh, flashes come around, uh, almost on time
As we look back at the earth, it's, uh, up at about 11 o'clock
About, uh, well, maybe ten or twelve dianrers—diameters, uh
I don't know whether that does you any good
But there's somethin' out there
– “Contact” from Random Access Memories by Daft Punk
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