A writer wants to reconnect with someone they used to trade drafts with years ago, before both of them got busy and the emails tapered off. The instinct is to send a message, not make a call, because a call feels like it risks a stretch of dead air neither person can blame on a slow reply. Researchers built an experiment around exactly that instinct and found it was backward: the phone call people dread turns out to feel better than the message they’d rather send, and the people avoiding the call are the ones least aware of it.
What the experiment actually asked people to do
In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by marketing professor Amit Kumar and psychologist Nicholas Epley, participants were asked to identify an old friend they had lost touch with and would like to reconnect with. Before any contact happened, they predicted how awkward the exchange would be and how connected they’d feel afterward, by phone and by email. Then they were randomly assigned to actually reach out using one medium or the other and reported back on how it went. Participants consistently predicted the phone call would be more awkward than the email, even though they also, somewhat contradictorily, expected it would leave them feeling more connected. Given that tension, most said they’d rather email.
What happened when they actually called
The calls didn’t go the way anyone expected. People who phoned their old friend reported forming a significantly stronger bond than those who emailed, and — the detail that overturns the whole prediction — they did not find it any more awkward than the people who emailed did. As Kumar put it in an interview about the research, “We think it’s going to be awkward to talk to somebody, but that just turns out not to be the case. Instead… people form significantly stronger bonds when they’re talking on the phone than when communicating over email.” The researchers even timed the calls against how long it took people to compose and send an email: reconnecting by phone took roughly the same amount of time as reconnecting by text, which knocks out the other common justification for avoiding it.
The same pattern shows up with total strangers
A second experiment in the same study removed the old-friendship variable entirely. Participants were paired with someone they’d never met and assigned to get acquainted using voice chat, video chat, or text chat, working through a set of increasingly personal questions designed to build closeness quickly.
Once again, people didn’t even expect a difference — they predicted feeling equally connected and equally awkward no matter which format they were assigned. And once again, their actual experience diverged from that expectation: hearing another person’s voice produced significantly more closeness than typing did, with no corresponding rise in awkwardness, and video added nothing measurable beyond what audio alone provided.
The effect wasn’t limited to a narrow kind of exchange, either: participants worked through prompts ranging from ordinary icebreakers to more personal ones, like describing an embarrassing moment — the full range the “fast friends” procedure is built to cover — and the voice-based conditions still came out ahead overall.
Why the voice itself seems to be doing the work
The researchers’ explanation centers on what a voice carries that text strips out. Kumar has pointed to related research showing that people who merely heard a job pitch rated the applicant as more thoughtful and competent than people who read the identical pitch as a transcript, and that people who listened to a political opponent’s argument were less likely to dehumanize them than people who read the same words on a page. None of that requires anything visual — video conferred no advantage over audio alone in either the original study or these related ones — which points to something specific about vocal tone, pacing, and inflection carrying signals of thought and feeling that flattened text simply does not transmit, regardless of how well-written the message is.
Why this cuts against the grain of how most outreach gets done
Email and its faster cousins — a DM, a comment reply, a scheduling link — have become the default for almost every kind of professional reconnection a writer does: pitching an editor who hasn’t replied in months, following up with a podcast host after a guest appearance, checking in with a co-author on a stalled project. Each of those defaults exists because writing a message feels lower-risk than picking up the phone, exactly the calculation Kumar and Epley’s participants made before their calls. The research does not suggest email is a bad tool for scheduling or quick logistics — participants in the study still found it useful for exactly that. What it suggests is that when the actual goal is repairing or deepening a relationship rather than coordinating a task, the medium people instinctively reach for is the one built to under-deliver on that specific goal.
The gap between prediction and experience is the part worth sitting with. It isn’t that people know calling would feel better and email anyway out of habit; the study’s participants got the emotional trade-off backward, expecting connection without paying the cost of awkwardness that never actually showed up. For anyone maintaining a list of people they mean to reach out to — a source who hasn’t returned an email, a fellow writer they haven’t spoken to since a conference two years ago — the research suggests the outreach method that feels the safest to send is quietly the one least likely to produce the connection they’re reaching out for in the first place.
