Everyone has been there. You get invited to something that you absolutely do not want to attend – a holiday party, a family cookout, an expensive trip. But doubts and anxieties creep into your head as you weigh whether to decline.
You might wonder if you’ll upset the person who invited you. Maybe it’ll harm the friendship, or they won’t extend an invite to the next get-together.
Should you just grit your teeth and go? Or are you worrying more than you should about saying “no”?
In a pilot study that we ran ahead of the main studies, we found that 77% of our 51 respondents had accepted an invitation to an event that they didn’t want to attend, fearing blowback if they were to decline. They worried that saying no might upset, anger or sadden the person who invited them. They also worried that they wouldn’t be invited to events down the road and that their own invitations would be rebuffed.
We then ran a series of studies in which we asked some people to imagine declining an invitation, and then report their assumptions about how the person extending the invite would feel. We asked other participants to imagine that someone had declined invitations they had extended themselves. Then we asked them how they felt about the rejection.
We ended up finding quite the mismatch. People tend to assume others will react poorly when an invitation isn’t accepted. But they’re relatively unaffected when someone turns down an invite they’ve extended.
In fact, people extending invites were much more understanding – and less upset, angry or sad than invitees anticipated. They also said they would be rather unlikely to let a single declined invitation keep them from offering or accepting invitations in the future.
We found that the asymmetry between people extending and receiving invites occurred regardless of whether it involved two friends, a new couple or two people who had been in a relationship for a long time.
Everyone has been there. You get invited to something that you absolutely do not want to attend – a holiday party, a family cookout, an expensive trip. But doubts and anxieties creep into your head as you weigh whether to decline.
You might wonder if you’ll upset the person who invited you. Maybe it’ll harm the friendship, or they won’t extend an invite to the next get-together.
Should you just grit your teeth and go? Or are you worrying more than you should about saying “no”?
Netflix says its subscriber growth slowed dramatically during the summer, a sign that the huge gains from the video-streaming service’s crackdown on freeloading viewers is tapering off