December means an avalanche of invites to parties. It also means oodles of anxiety for the burned-out, the introverted, and the hikikomori who would prefer to say no but are afraid that doing so will have negative consequences.
Julian Givi, an assistant professor at West Virginia University, and Colleen Kirk, an associate professor at New York Institute of Technology, found that 77% of participants in a study accepted an invitation because they were afraid of what would happen if they declined. To understand the true impact of saying no, the same researchers conducted a follow-up study that involved a series of experiments with more than 2,000 people.
In one of the experiments, people were asked to read about a scenario where their friend Alex invited them to the museum but they had to decline, or that they were inviting their friend Alex to the museum and Alex declined. In another, participants and their significant others took turns inviting each other to an event and declining. In a third experiment, participants read about a situation where someone declined an invitation and predicted how the inviter would feel as an outside observer.
“Across our experiments, we consistently found that invitees overestimate the negative ramifications that arise in the eyes of inviters following an invitation decline,” Givi told Phys.org. “People tend to exaggerate the degree to which the person who issued the invitation will focus on the act of the invitee declining the invitation as opposed to the thoughts that passed through their head before they declined.”
The researchers do take care to point out that time spent together strengthens relationships—in other words, they don’t advise people to turn down every invitation. Overall, however, they noted that saying no to an invite isn’t as disastrous as it might feel. “[In] the cases where people must say no, or decide an activity is something they would rather pass on, our results suggest that the negative ramifications may not be as bad as they might think,” they wrote.
The research was published by the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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