Call or text an old friend? What a 2021 study found, and when each works best

Calling a friend you’ve drifted from can feel harder than it should. In experiments published in 2021 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, the fear of an awkward call was what steered people toward typing instead. Amit Kumar of the University of Texas at Austin and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago found the call was no more awkward than an email, and it left people feeling closer.

This week, take one message you were about to type to a friend and make it a 10-minute call instead. Texting still has jobs it does better, and the sections below sort out which is which.

What the old-friend experiment found

In the main test, 200 people picked an old friend they hadn’t contacted in a while. They predicted how it would feel to reconnect by email or by phone, and then the researchers randomly assigned them to do one or the other.

Most expected a call to make them feel more connected. They still said they’d rather email, since they expected the call to feel more awkward. Afterward, the people who called reported a significantly stronger bond with their friend, and they felt no more awkward than the people who wrote.

The researchers also timed the reconnecting. According to the University of Texas’s announcement of the study, the call took about as long as reading and answering an email.

A separate lab test paired strangers for live chats by voice, video or typed text, with personal questions to answer. People expected the format not to matter, but they felt closer when they talked than when they typed.

Two limits are worth knowing. The old-friend test compared a phone call with email, and many of the participants were college students.

Kumar’s guess is that the fear centers on the first few moments, when you say hello and wait. “You’re on the phone for 15 or 20 minutes, and the majority of that is super pleasant,” he said in “When We Fear an Awkward Phone Call, We Often Turn to Text”, a 2020 feature from the McCombs School of Business. Plan your first sentence before you dial, and let the rest of the call happen on its own.

Why hearing a voice matters

A 2013 study at the University of California, Los Angeles brought in 29 pairs of close female friends, all university students ages 18 to 21. Each pair had four 5-minute conversations: in person, by video chat, by audio only and by instant message.

After each conversation, both friends rated how bonded they felt on a scale from 0 to 8. The researchers also timed, from video recordings, how long each person laughed.

Typing nearly wiped out the laughter. Over instant message, the friends laughed for 1.99 seconds per conversation on average.

With audio alone, laughter rose to 6.81 seconds. Video came in at 8.19 seconds and in person at 8.21, nearly the same.

The bonding scores fell in the same order, from 6.59 in person to 6.02 for audio and 5.88 for typing. Every format left the friends feeling fairly close, and the gap between audio and typing was too small to count as a real difference. Typed chat still scored significantly lower than meeting in person.

Text also strips out tone. A 2005 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, by Justin Kruger, Epley and two colleagues, ran five experiments on email and found that writers overrate how clearly a sarcastic or funny line comes through. Before you send a joke that only works in your voice, read it once as if a stranger had written it.

What texting still does better

Texting is how most younger adults already keep in touch. In a 2014 Gallup survey of 1,015 adults, more than two-thirds of 18- to 29-year-olds said they had texted “a lot” the day before. Gallup’s release on the survey noted that adults 65 and older relied most on cellphones, landlines and email, and texted far less.

It wins on logistics. A meeting time, an address, a photo of the menu or a note that you’re running 10 minutes late is clearer in writing, and your friend can answer when they’re free.

A short hello also lands better than you’d think. In a paper published online in 2022, Peggy Liu of the University of Pittsburgh and three coauthors reported a series of experiments with more than 5,900 participants in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. People who reached out to someone “just because”, by text, email, phone, note or small gift, consistently underestimated how much the other person would appreciate it, rated on a 7-point scale.

The gap was widest when the message came as a surprise or the two people weren’t close. “People significantly underestimate how much others will appreciate being reached out to,” Liu said in the American Psychological Association’s release on the study.

That makes a two-line text a fine opening move. If a call won’t happen this week, send the message you’ve been sitting on to someone you haven’t heard from in months.

Calls, texts and voice messages compared

The table pulls the research together, with one honest gap. None of these studies tested voice messages, so that column is our read of what the studies found about voice.

The bonding row draws on the Kumar and Epley experiments and the 2013 UCLA study.

A voice message sits in the middle. It keeps the sound of your voice but loses the live back-and-forth that every audio chat in these studies had. Use one for a friend whose free hours never line up with yours.

A voice message keeps your tone and lets your friend listen whenever they have a free minute.

When a friend has no free time

For a friend with small children or rotating shifts, a surprise call can feel like one more demand. Text first to ask when 10 minutes would suit them, and then call at that time. Liu’s findings suggest the text itself will be welcome, and the call adds the voice.

If even a scheduled call keeps slipping, a voice message they can play on a commute is the next best option.

When you live in different time zones

Distance makes texting the default, and a long thread can stand in for a real catch-up for years. Set one call a month at an hour that works on both ends. At 9 a.m. on a Sunday in Seattle, it is already noon in Boston.

Our guide to making friends as an adult counts the roughly 50 hours a new friendship takes. An old friend already has those hours banked, and a monthly call keeps the friendship from going quiet.

After a fight or a hard week

Disagreements are where missing tone costs the most. Without it, a one-word “fine” can read as cold. When a thread starts to get tense, stop typing and send one line: “Can I call you?”

A call is also worth the effort for bad news, a loss or a friend who seems low. If a friend tells you they’re in crisis, help them reach a professional, or call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Call one person tonight

Open your messages and scroll until you find a friend you’ve only texted for the past year. Call them tonight, before 9 p.m. their time. If they don’t pick up, leave a voice message under a minute that names a day you’re free.

Start with the one whose last message from you was a birthday emoji.