how connection developsPeople receiving letters of gratitude felt more positive and less awkward than the writers expected. The writers already anticipated that their appreciation would be welcome. They underestimated how welcome it would be.
Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley's 2018 paper examined this difference from both sides. Participants wrote to someone who had affected their lives, predicted the recipient's reaction, and allowed researchers to invite that person to report their actual experience. Other studies examined how expectations related to the decision to send a letter.
The paper makes the recipient's experience more visible. What occupies the writer while composing an expression of thanks may differ from what matters to the person reading it.
Telling someone what their contribution meant
The letter-writing instructions were concrete. Participants identified someone they felt grateful to, described what that person had done, and explained how it had affected their life. The first study recruited MBA students, while a second laboratory study encouraged a broader range of recipients, including parents, friends, teachers, and other people in participants' lives.
After sending their letters, writers predicted how recipients would feel. The researchers distinguished surprise at receiving a letter from surprise at learning its particular content. They also asked about positive mood and awkwardness. Recipients who responded to the follow-up answered corresponding questions.
In both studies, writers underestimated how positively recipients would feel and overestimated their awkwardness. They also underestimated surprise at the reasons for gratitude described in the letter. Surprise at receiving the letter itself was underestimated in the first study but not in the second.
That distinction between receiving thanks and learning why it mattered gives the result depth. A person may know they offered help without knowing how the help was experienced or remembered. The writer has lived with that meaning and may find it familiar by the time they put it into words. The letter supplied information that was already familiar to its writer and could be new to its recipient.
Writing the letters was also a positive experience for participants. Their reported mood after writing was better than their baseline mood in the first two studies. Those before-and-after comparisons accompanied the central finding about prediction and response. They did not, by themselves, compare letter writing with every other activity that might have improved mood.
How expectations relate to the decision to write
The next studies asked whether anticipated reactions were related to willingness to express gratitude. In one, participants thought of five people they appreciated and considered writing to each. They were more willing to send a letter when they expected the recipient to feel positive and less willing when they expected awkwardness.
Another study asked participants to identify possible recipients who differed in their anticipated reactions, while being people toward whom they felt similarly grateful. Participants then chose and wrote to one of them. When choosing between pairs, about 89 percent preferred the person they expected to feel especially positive, and about 85 percent preferred the person they expected to feel less awkward. Their eventual letters followed a similar pattern. The comparison makes clear that feeling grateful and deciding to express it were separate parts of the experience.
Expectations about surprise did not reliably guide these choices. Surprise was more ambiguous than the authors had anticipated. It could be imagined as welcome or uncomfortable, whereas expected positive mood and awkwardness provided clearer directions for a decision.
These findings explain how an inaccurate forecast could matter in ordinary life. If a person's willingness to express appreciation depends partly on an expected reaction, underestimating that reaction can make an expression seem less worthwhile than it would be. The studies linked expectations with choices, without showing that correcting any particular expectation will necessarily cause a person to send more letters.
Participants in the choice study also reported writing gratitude letters less often than they would like. That was their own appraisal of their behavior. It gives the research a practical relevance for people who already want to express appreciation more often, without assigning that goal to everyone.
The writer's wording and the recipient's experience
A final main experiment examined competence and warmth. Writers rated how well they had expressed themselves and how articulate they expected to appear. They also predicted how warm and sincere the letter would seem. Recipients evaluated the same qualities.
Writers underestimated both. The gap was particularly large for competence. Recipients regarded the letters as better expressed than their writers had expected, alongside finding them warm and sincere. On a scale from zero to ten, writers' average competence estimate was about seven, while recipients' average rating was above nine. The writers were not expecting their letters to fail. Their recipients nevertheless saw more in the expression than the writers anticipated.
Related work reported in the paper found that concerns about what to write and how articulate to be often came to mind first when people considered expressing gratitude. Expectations about being able to find suitable words were also associated with willingness to write. Together, these findings suggest that a writer's standard for an adequate expression can become an unnecessary obstacle in some cases.
The researchers proposed that recipients attend to the warmth of receiving appreciation while writers give considerable attention to producing it competently. The experiment did not independently manipulate those concerns, and warmth and competence ratings were related. It therefore supports that explanation without proving it as the sole mechanism.
A separate follow-up asked outside readers to imagine either writing or receiving some of the same letters. Their expectations about mood and awkwardness were similar in either imagined role, and closer to the original writers' expectations than to the recipients' reported experience. Reading an expression addressed to someone else did not fully reproduce receiving it oneself.
The important comparison remains concrete. The people who actually received the letters rated their expression more favorably than the writers predicted. The writers' uncertainty about their words was not an accurate measure of how those words were received.
Whose reactions were available
The recipient findings concern people who completed the follow-up surveys. Some recipients did not respond, and some writers did not authorize researchers to contact them. If nonrespondents had different experiences, the available reports would not capture the full range.
The authors examined this concern, and most comparisons of writers' predictions did not differ significantly by recipient response. The supplementary results contain an exception. In the second study, writers whose contacted recipients did not respond had expected more awkwardness than writers whose recipients responded. The central mismatch appeared in studies with different response rates, but these checks cannot tell us what the missing recipients actually felt.
The study also concerns sincere gratitude toward people the writers selected. It does not establish the same response to every message, in every relationship, or at every time. Its contribution is an observed pattern in these chosen exchanges. A favorable average also leaves room for individual differences. The studies did not follow whether a letter changed the relationship over the months that followed.
Making appreciation specific enough to receive
The task did not require an elaborate tribute. It asked writers to make three things available to another person, what they had done, why the writer appreciated it, and how it had mattered. That specificity carried information the recipient could respond to.
A person considering such an expression has more to draw on than a private judgment of their writing. The recipient may be learning that a contribution was noticed and valued. In these studies, the people receiving that information experienced more warmth and less awkwardness than the writers had allowed for in their predictions.
Sources
Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2018). Undervaluing gratitude: Expressers misunderstand the consequences of showing appreciation. Psychological Science, 29(9), 1423–1435. Read the full paper. Supplemental material.