Misjudging How to Help: Barriers to Effective Social Support Provision

Abstract

Relying on others for support is a common coping strategy. However, support providers often fail to provide effective support. Past work suggests that support providers may prioritize help aimed at alleviating others’ distress at the expense of providing sufficient emotional validation to those seeking help (High & Steuber, 2014). Integrating past research on social support, motivation, and self-regulation, I propose that support providers’ well-intentioned helping goals may lead them to devalue emotional validation, a form of support that tends to be beneficial to support recipients. Two studies (N = 415) investigated support providers’ perceptions of the helpfulness of different types of social support. Results suggest that emotional validation was seen as less helpful by support providers, particularly in comparison to support aimed at reducing or solving the support seeker’s problem (e.g., offering advice or resources). By exploring the perceptions of support providers, this work offers new insight as to why support providers may fail to give adequate emotional validation during support interactions.