"They know I appreciate them"

The next belief is that the appreciation is there and the people around you can see it. You don't say thank you for the table because your partner knows. Of course they know. You've been together for years. You'd be embarrassed to spell it out, and they'd be embarrassed to hear it.

Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, two psychologists who study how people misjudge social situations, ran three experiments on exactly this and published them in 2018. They had participants write a letter of thanks to someone who'd done something for them, and then predict how the recipient would feel. How surprised. How happy. How awkward. The letters were sent, and the recipients reported how they actually felt.

The writers got it wrong in a consistent direction. They underestimated how surprised the recipients would be about what they were being thanked for. They underestimated how good the recipients would feel. And they overestimated how awkward it would be. In the same study, the writers' expectations of awkwardness and mood were linked to how willing they were to express thanks at all. The people who thought it would be awkward and land flat were the people who didn't do it.

I think there are two things in that finding, and both matter here. The first is that recipients were surprised. Not surprised to be thanked, exactly, but surprised by what for. The letter told them that something they'd done had been noticed and had mattered, and they hadn't known. That's the "they know" belief tested and failed. The people being thanked did not know. They'd been carrying on with no idea that anything they did had registered.

The second is that the gap runs the same way for everyone. It's not that some people are bad at guessing. The writers as a group expected less pleasure and more awkwardness than there was. If you feel sure your partner knows, and sure that saying so would be strange, you're feeling what those participants felt before they sent the letters, and they were wrong.

The study used letters, and I'm extending it to something said in a kitchen. I think the extension holds, because the mistake is about how the other person feels and not about the medium, but I should say that it's my extension.

Here's the plain version. Your appreciation is inside you, where they can't see it. What they can see is the commentary. If you want them to know, the appreciation has to leave your head and cross the room, and the only vehicle it's got is words. They can't read it off you. Nobody can. And when it does cross the room, it lands better than you expect.