Social support: warm-heartedness is more important than competence
Offers of help do not have to be particularly competent or useful - what counts most is genuine sympathy. A few compassionate words can therefore do more than you think.
Whether money worries, illness or family quarrels: When someone is in crisis, friends and acquaintances often don't know whether to bring up the subject and prefer to say nothing at all. But the worry is unnecessary. Those affected take verbal support more positively and are less unpleasantly touched than expected. This is the result of a series of studies with more than 600 test persons in the scientific journal "Psychological Science".
First, social psychologist Nicholas Epley and his colleagues from the University of Chicago investigated why people hesitate to offer their help in the first place. To do this, they asked 100 subjects to write to a friend or relative who was currently struggling with a problem. The more positive the presumed effect of the message, the more willing the test subjects were to actually send it. Surprisingly, how great the distress of the person concerned was in their eyes did not play a role.
In another experiment, students were asked to send such a message to someone they knew on campus. Again, the addressees were less uncomfortable than the senders had expected, and the supportive words also seemed more warm and competent to them than had been assumed on the part of the senders. What reaction they had expected and what it actually turned out to be was unrelated - so the senders had no idea how their message would be received. They were particularly pessimistic if it was a distant acquaintance. But in fact, their reaction was equally positive as that of close friends.
Support is underestimated
Even between strangers who first met in the lab, the same pattern emerged. One person was asked to describe a problem of their own, such as a family dispute, and the other was asked to comment on it, for example to express sympathy. The support was again better received than expected.
The discrepancy between the two was not clear.
The three researchers attribute the discrepancy to different perspectives, as they concluded from another study with fictitious case studies. According to the study, warm-hearted, genuine sympathy was most important to those affected - the helpers, on the other hand, believed they had to prove themselves competent and useful. "They hesitate because they fear not being able to give competent support," the study authors explain. "They systematically underestimate how positively any form of assistance is received."
So many opportunities to help remain unused.
Spectrum of Science
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