Gratitude Letters: Not as Awkward as You Think, and More Impactful
While writing my book, I Want to Thank You, I came across this study, which proved that people overestimate the awkwardness of a heartfelt thank you, and they underestimate its impact. I immediately emailed the co-author, Amit Kumar, who kindly answered all of my many questions, and eventually agreed to jump on the phone for an interview that I quoted in chapter seven of my book. Here is our Q&A, in which we discuss how much gratitude letters mean to their recipients, and that squirmy feeling associated with freely expressing gratitude—the most uncool of emotions.
Gina Hamadey (Q): Hello! Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about awkwardness. Let’s start there. Why do you think people feel awkward about writing a gratitude letter?
Amit Kumar (A): People are often thinking about these initial moments—sending out a letter at the mailbox. Or when you say hello on the phone, that’s what I’m thinking about. What’s going to happen? I don’t know what we’re going to talk about for the next two minutes. It could be uncomfortable. As you start talking, it’s not awkward or uncomfortable at all. So people might be focusing on these points of time that aren’t actually reflective of what you think about. Like when I think back to this conversation later on, I’m not going to be thinking about the moment that one of us said hello. I’m going to be thinking about everything else that we talked about, which is surely a much more positive and less uncomfortable experience.
Q: All of the notes that I wrote, and I wrote hundreds, were all awkward in some way to send…
A: Except that they probably weren’t. You might have felt that way, but I’m guessing they actually weren’t.
Q: For your study, did you try to make the participants feel more at ease?
A: In an experiment it would be problematic if we were trying to make people feel more comfortable! Part of capturing the phenomenon is exactly what you are saying. People reported feeling uncomfortable. They were worried that it would be awkward for the person that was getting it. People were writing to former teachers, bosses. You have these fears. An offshoot of the word “gratitude” is “ingratiating,” and that’s a much less positive word. You might think that you’re sucking up or being over the top. It could seem uncomfortable from the perspective of the person writing the letter. But then, as you know, because we measure how people feel when they get these letters, it’s not awkward or uncomfortable at all.
Q: Why is it so hard for people?
A: It’s pretty deeply rooted. A lot of what’s going on with people when they say they feel awkward is an asymmetry that’s deeply ingrained in human psychology. It’s what’s called social cognition, or thinking about the mind of another person—what’s going to go on in someone else’s head. And this asymmetry is a perspective-based difference that’s hard to get over. It’s one of the hardest things that human beings do. It seems so simple, because we are doing it all the time. We think, Oh, what’s she thinking? What’s he feeling? Those are the types of questions that we ask ourselves all the time. So they seem simple. But the analogy people use for how you take another person’s perspective is often that you’re anchored at your own perspective, and then you’re trying to adjust away. So you realize that however someone is feeling is not quite how you’d be feeling. So you recognize that there is a difference. But the difference is much larger than people expect it is. You anchor at yourself, and you as an actor or agent or writer are thinking about competence-related concerns. You adjust away a little bit, but not to the point where you get to the perspective of the target or recipient or observer, where you’re focused more on warmth than on competence. So it’s a hard mental problem to get over.
So my perspective as the writer or agent, I’m thinking about competence, primarily. In this context that’s stuff like making sure you get the right words, writing a well-written letter. What are the actual things that I’m going to say? You have all of these options, these choices, that you’re making comparisons between. That’s what you’re thinking about when you’re an actor, or an agent. But when your perspective is a target, or a recipient in this case who receives the letter, instead of thinking about competence, you tend to think about warmth, and the fact that you are doing it vs. not doing it at all. So you are thinking about which card to choose. They would never think, why did she choose this card instead of this card? Or they aren’t thinking about why did she choose to write these words this way? Or why did she express herself with this sentence instead of that sentence? That’s what YOU think about while you are composing, as you are writing a letter. They don’t have that explicit comparison in mind. They are just reading what you have to say, and thinking, this is really nice. They aren’t thinking, well, how could it have been nicer?
Q: Do you have any advice for people trying to get over that squirmy feeling?
A: So one thing that we tried, empirically, was to have people imagine being recipients, and then write a letter and make predictions about how a recipient would feel. That didn’t seem to work very well. Just thinking about what it might feel like doesn’t actually make you more accurate in your predictions. Part of the reason we did this research, the hope, is that this work can encourage people to go ahead and do this more often. The barrier here is that you think it’s more awkward than it’s going to be. And so if you know from scientific studies, from empirical research, that it’s actually as awkward as you think, maybe there’s something liberating about that, that can help you get over that hurdle.
One practical suggestion is to think back to times when they’ve received a gratitude letter, when they’ve actually been a recipient rather than imagining what it’s like to be a recipient. If you remember the way you felt the last time you received a card like this, maybe that would help you recognize that it mainly feels positive, and doesn’t feel negative, and then you won’t be thinking about these negative, anxiety-producing, awkward feelings. That’s one possibility. But even then, what’s interesting about gratitude, is that it’s often something very specific or unique to the interaction. So people can still face this barrier, where they think, oh sure, it was nice in that specific situation, because of this reason, but this now that I’m in this new situation where I want to write a letter to somebody, this is going to be awkward for this particular reason. And they overblow those fears again.
The studies that we do are about miscalibration. What you are asking to do is recalibrate people. How do you get them to be better calibrated? The only solution that researchers think of are heavy handed or over the top, which is to tell people straight on that they are miscalibrated. Actually, the truth is X. And if you know what the truth is, then your behavior can change. But it’s hard to get your mind thinking about what it’s not used to think about.
Q: In the year that I sent out 365 gratitude notes and letters, I got a lot of really nice feedback, and quite a few times I heard the phrase, “I am going through a hard time, and this meant a lot.” So I think the lesson is, you never know when someone is going through a rough spot. And if you happen to send them a letter in that time, it’ll mean all the more.
A: I think about most of this stuff in the aggregate rather than anecdotes or personal stories. If i was thinking about the aggregate, I would think that part of what you said is probably true, and part is likely not true. The part that I think is right is there are only sometimes when somebody will open up like that and tell you how they really feel, give you an accurate representation about their reaction. But I actually think that reaction is not super dependent on timing or specific to a particular case. So when we look at the results of how people report feeling when receiving these letters… and this is looking at hundreds of people, not just individual cases, there’s actually very little variability in responses. So it’s not like it makes some people feel great and some people feel just okay and some people feel kind of weird. Almost everybody is saying that they feel really really great. It’s unlikely that they all have something incredibly traumatic going on. I guess everybody always has some stuff going on. And so it could be the case that this pick me up is kind of a boost, when they are thinking about all the stuff that they have going on in their lives. So that reaction, I think, is very typical rather than atypical. The part that is atypical is the fact that this person actually told you all of that stuff. Usually you don’t find out that information. But I think that’s how people actually feel.
I am able to know as a scientist how people actually feel because I send them a questionnaire and they answer those questions, and I am able to get responses in a numerical way. But the people who got all of your notes in the mail didn’t tell you, “You might have thought that I felt a ‘3,’ but I actually felt a ‘5’!” Nobody actually says that to somebody. They might just say, “That was really nice,” and then you’re left to interpret what that means. And what it means to them was that it was really, really, really nice, and you’re not getting an accurate representation of how powerful it was, or how much of an impact you had.