Dormant ties outperform the picture you keep of them. Researchers prompted hundreds of executives to consult people they hadn’t contacted in three years or more (Source: MIT Sloan Management Review).

Those old contacts proved as valuable as current ones, often more, and delivered fresher insight with less effort (Source: MIT Sloan Management Review).

Hesitation also misreads the other side. Across experiments with more than 5,900 participants, people consistently misjudged how much others valued an unexpected call, text, or email (Source: American Psychological Association, 2022).

Age sharpens the payoff. A 30-year-old manager’s average reconnection scored 5.16 out of 7 for value received, rising to 5.60 for a 50-year-old (Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2016). The contacts kept moving. Only the remembered version froze.

A notification pops up. Someone you used to work with just hit five years at their company. You haven’t thought about them in ages. Before you tap “like,” your mind rewinds. They missed deadlines. They talked over people in meetings. Those memories stopped updating the day you two stopped working together, yet they still feel current.

So you open their profile.

They now run a team of twelve. They wrote a long post about learning to listen in meetings, and someone you respect left a comment thanking them for mentoring her.

Which version do you believe? The person in your head, or the person on the screen?

Why First Impressions Freeze

Quick Summary: A single bad meeting hardens into a permanent trait. Observers credit behavior to character and discount circumstance, a pattern Lee Ross named the fundamental attribution error (Source: Lee Ross, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1977). Labels drop the date, so nothing in them signals when to recheck.

Think back to that coworker. You probably didn’t write “missed the deadline because two engineers quit that month.” You wrote, “unreliable.”

Psychologists have a name for that shortcut. In 1967, Edward Jones and Victor Harris had students read essays whose positions the writers didn’t choose, and readers still credited the opinions to the writers. Lee Ross later called the habit the fundamental attribution error. We read a moment as a personality.

Then the label loses its timestamp. “Missed a deadline in spring 2017” tells you when to look again. “Unreliable” never expires, and one rough quarter turns into a file you keep for a decade.

What Dormant Ties Research Reveals About Former Colleagues

Quick Summary: Former coworkers gather new jobs, teams, and problems during years of silence. Advice seekers in the 2011 Organization Science study got fresher ideas from long-lost colleagues than from active ones (Source: Organization Science, 2011). Memory locks each colleague inside the last meeting you two shared.

In 2011, management researchers Daniel Levin, Jorge Walter, and Keith Murnighan asked executives to reach out to people they hadn’t spoken with in at least three years. The researchers called these contacts “dormant ties.” Each executive asked a dormant tie for advice on a current work project, then put the same question to people they talked with regularly. Afterward, the executives rated the advice they received.

The old contacts often won. Their advice often brought fresher, more useful ideas. Why? During those quiet years, the dormant ties had changed jobs, joined new teams, and wrestled with problems the executives never saw. Nobody stood still. Only the executives’ picture of them did.

Weak Ties, Dormant Ties, and Where New Ideas Come From

Quick Summary: Distant acquaintances carry information your close circle already shares. Mark Granovetter’s 1973 paper argued that weak ties bridge separate social circles (Source: American Journal of Sociology, 1973). Dormant ties extend that reach, because years apart give an old coworker a whole second network.

Sociologist Mark Granovetter spotted the pattern more than fifty years ago. In “The Strength of Weak Ties,” he examined how people found jobs. Most people who landed work through a personal contact heard about it from someone they saw only occasionally. Close friends know what you know. Acquaintances spend their days in other rooms.

A dormant tie gives you both sides. You once shared a hallway, so trust comes easier. Then they spent years in rooms you never entered. Levin’s team found that reconnecting previously strong ties led to all four benefits usually associated with either weak or strong ties.

Why We Hesitate to Reach Out to Old Friends and Colleagues

Quick Summary: Senders consistently underestimate how warmly an out-of-the-blue message lands. Appreciation ran higher when the reach-out came as a bigger surprise (Source: PsyPost, 2022). A note from a casual acquaintance often lands hardest.

Most of us rarely reconnect, and a 2022 study by Peggy Liu and her colleagues hints at one reason. Participants sent short notes to friends they hadn’t talked to in a while, then predicted how much those friends would appreciate hearing from them. The researchers also asked the friends. Senders consistently guessed low. Recipients valued the note more than expected, partly because it arrived as a surprise.

The same lowball shows up face to face. In 2018, Erica Boothby and her colleagues paired strangers for conversations, then asked each person how much their partner liked them. People guessed low. Their partners liked them more than they thought, a pattern the researchers called the liking gap (Source: Psychological Science, 2018). Your guess about how a former coworker sees you might run on the same bad estimate.

A frozen picture of someone rarely travels alone. Assume a person hasn’t changed, and you’ll also assume you know how they’ll react to hearing from you.

Someone Keeps a File on You, Too

Quick Summary: Former managers still carry a fixed label for you, filed after a few tense meetings. That label ignores every promotion, course correction, and LinkedIn update since. You hold the same kind of file on others, and nobody you filed ever got to edit it.

Here comes the uncomfortable part.

Somewhere, a former manager or coworker still remembers you by a moment you’d rather forget. Maybe they tagged you “difficult” after a few tense meetings years ago. You can’t touch that file. If you run into them tomorrow, they might still see the person from those meetings, no matter what you’ve done since.

It runs both ways. I’ve kept files on people. A few coworkers I once wrote off as insecure in my journals never got a say in what I wrote down, much like you can’t edit a word of this article. Only the person holding the pen can.

Checking an Old Impression Doesn’t Mean Reopening the Door

Quick Summary: Harm, physical or emotional, justifies keeping distance from whoever caused it. A quiet check, like glancing at a LinkedIn profile, updates belief without renewing contact. Liu’s team studied lost touch from life changes, not falling-outs, and noted results could differ there (Source: PsyPost, 2022).

Some beliefs hold up for good reason. If someone hurt you physically, emotionally, or mentally, you owe them no outreach. You can still revise what you believe about a person without letting them back into your life, like glancing at a former colleague’s profile and never sending a message.

Sometimes a check confirms the old belief. People drift, but some patterns hold. That still counts, because you looked instead of assuming.

What to Say When You Reach Out

Quick Summary: A three-sentence note does the job. A specific shared memory signals genuine attention instead of a networking ask. Liu’s team found that recipients appreciated gestures as simple as a brief check-in text or a small gift, so the effort matters less than sending it.

Keep it short. Name one shared moment and attach a year. Ask what they’ve worked on lately. Then stop. No favor, no pitch, and no “let’s grab coffee” unless you mean it.

Something like this works. “Hey Dana, the 2017 launch came up today, and I realized I have no idea what you’ve built since. What have you worked on lately?”

A Small Assignment for Updating Outdated First Impressions

Quick Summary: A written first impression shows how little evidence actually supports the belief. Attaching a year to the original event turns a permanent-sounding trait back into one moment. Rereading several years later shows who kept changing, and sometimes that includes you.

Pick one person you hold a strong belief about. An old coworker works best, though a classmate or a relative you rarely see works too.

Write down the label you gave them, something like “selfish” or “loud.” Under it, write the event that started the belief and attach a year, as in “Missed the launch deadline, spring 2017.” If you can’t remember the event, write that down too.

Then go check. Look at what they’ve posted lately, or ask someone who still knows them. If it feels right and safe, send a short note asking what they’ve worked on recently. Jot down anything that doesn’t match the label.

Put the page away. Read it again in a few years, and notice who kept moving.

Questions and Responses