Feel free to say no!

We're probably all familiar with the intoxicating feeling of cancelling plans. Sometimes, we all feel obligated to honour commitments that we didn't feel like making. Saying no to plans in the first place can be incredibly difficult, even if we don't fancy them, and can feel like a delicate dance of making sure we're invited to things in the future, trying not to offend a friend, or simply minimising conflict. There are plenty of reasons why we might smile and say 'yeah, definitely!' 

Yet we may be more free to say no than we realise. It seems that we overestimate the social ramifications of declining plans, according to a new study from US academics Julian Givi and Colleen P. Kirk. In their latest publication, Givi and Kirk find that invitees have "exaggerated concerns" about how much saying no to a plan will annoy the person who invited us, and explore the thought process we have when we consider turning something down. 

For the first study described, participants were placed into several conditions. In the 'invitee' condition, they read that their friend had asked them to go to a museum that weekend; some participants read they would be going to the exhibit with just their friend, while others that they would be part of a group. They were then asked to imagine that they had turned down the invitation, before reporting what they believed the emotional and social fallout of their decision would be. In the 'inviter' condition, participants read that they had invited their friend but had been declined, and answered similar (reverse coded) questions.

The results showed a mismatch between these conditions. Analyses suggested that invitees overestimated how negative the ramifications would be for turning down invitations. A second study, which asked participants to decline real invitations from their partner, also found that negative consequences were overestimated, regardless of how long the couple had been together. This begins to build a picture of overestimation that holds across a number of different types of relationship. 

The team then sought to explore a further hypothesis: that we overestimate the consequences of declining invites because we overestimate how much saying no will affect the inviter. This time 560 participants, recruited via MTurk, read a similar vignette to that in the first study, declining an invitation to an event and then indicating potential ramifications.

Participants read that they were invited to a dinner cooked by a celebrity chef, but declined because they wanted to spend Saturday night alone. This time, though, a third condition was added: that of an observer, who was not part of the scenario, but simply imagined what the negative ramifications could be. 

Analyses showed that it wasn't just those directly involved in the scenario who overestimated the negative ramifications —  observers did, too. In fact, their predictions matched the negative outlooks held by the invitees, which suggests that the impact of saying no to invitations is blown out of proportion whether or not we're directly involved. 

In the fourth study, participants in the invitee condition completed the same measures, but used a real friend's name rather than a hypothetical one. After contemplating potential negative ramifications, they also responded to two additional measures: indicating how much their friend would think about their deliberations, and how much their friend would focus instead on the ultimate outcome. Those in the inviter condition completed the same questions from the opposite perspective. 

As well as overestimating negative ramifications, invitees believed that those who had invited them would be focused on them having said no, However, inviters were actually more focused on the reasons people declined their invitations than the fact their invitation had been declined. 

The team notes cultural differences in how this may be experienced — those living in collectivist cultures may have a different perspective, for example. Future research could also look at the impact of saying no to bigger, more significant events — after all, saying you can't attend a wedding or baby shower may be a bigger deal than not going to a restaurant or museum. Replications beyond MTurk, whose participants' behaviour may not be representative of the wider population, would also help to verify these patterns.

Whether we are overestimating our own importance or underestimating how much our friends understand our motivations, this study indicates that we can say 'no' much more than we think we can. So, go ahead and enjoy missing out on plans!

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000443