Homebodies, introverts and couch potatoes may be cheered by new West Virginia University research that shows most people overestimate the negative repercussions of declining social invitations because they underestimate others’ empathy for the process of deciding to say “no.”
The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published conclusions from five studies exploring inviter and invitee perspectives on turning down social invitations.
Lead author Julian Givi, assistant professor of marketing at the John Chambers College of Business and Economics, said, “People feel burned out and stretched thin on time, and social activities are part of the reason – lunches, ballgames, happy hours, dinner parties. Because saying no to invitations can be challenging, we accept them when we’d rather not. This research sheds light on one reason it’s so difficult to decline invitations to social activities: we overestimate the negative ramifications of doing so. Without upsetting anyone, people could likely pass on far more invitations than they currently do.”
Givi found that 77% of his research participants had unwillingly accepted an invitation because of concerns about the negative effects of declining.
“‘Will the person who invited me be angry? Will they think I don’t care about them? Will they invite me to do something again?’ Concerns like these lead us to accept invitations we’d rather decline,” he said.
However, Givi also discovered that invitees’ concerns are exaggerated. Largely that’s because they overestimate the degree to which inviters focus just on the basic act of the invitation being declined and underestimate how much inviters also consider the deliberations they imagine going through the invitee’s head prior to declining.
“In nearly all human behaviors, there are thoughts, then actions,” he said. “Declining an invitation involves those two stages. First, internal deliberations as we consider whether to accept. Second, the act of communicating that we’re declining.
“We deliberate because we have some desire to attend, some wish to please the inviter. That’s the warmer, friendlier stage. The second stage, saying no, involves a relatively harsh message. So it makes sense that the more an inviter focuses on stage 2, the more negative their response will be. But what we discovered is that invitees are wrong to think stage 2 is where inviters focus.”
People generally think others are poor at what Givi called “perspective taking.” That means people believe others focus relatively little on another individual’s thoughts and focus more on the individual’s behaviors. It’s a partial explanation for why invitees discount how much inviters consider the thought processes people go through as they mull an invitation over.
He said he believes this research is the first to demonstrate the common tendency to underestimate the degree to which people focus on others’ internal thoughts relative to their actions.
His findings are the result of five studies in which recruited participants playing different roles imagined issuing, receiving and declining invitations.
In one study, some participants imagined turning down a friend’s invitation to visit a museum exhibit, then indicated the friend’s probable negative reactions – anger, disappointment, feeling deprioritized, feeling the relationship was damaged, reluctance to invite the person out again. Other participants played the role of the friend and indicated their own reactions.
Additional studies involved participants who were real-life couples, the inclusion of the role of “outside observer,” the incorporation of participants’ real-life friends as characters in the thought experiments, and participants switching roles from inviters to invitees.
Givi was surprised that even the study involving real romantic couples backed up the idea that invitees are overly anxious about inviters’ reactions to declined invitations.
“Presumably, romantic couples possess lots of information about each other, are quite close and invite each other to activities frequently, so you might think these invitees would be relatively unconcerned with the negatives of declining their partners’ invitations – or that they could accurately predict their partners’ reactions,” he said.
The most actionable takeaway came from the study in which each participant played the role of both inviter and invitee. When those participants first imagined their own invitation being declined, then subsequently declined an invitation, they were less likely to overestimate how upset their inviters would be to receive their regrets.
“This points to a practical solution for getting better at predicting the response to a declined invitation,” Givi said. “First, imagine yourself in the role of the inviter, having your own invitation declined. You will notice that you don’t just hear the ‘no,’ but you take time to consider the deliberations leading to the ‘no.’ This may make it easier to say ‘no’ yourself.”
He emphasized that spending time with others is crucial for cultivating and strengthening relationships.
“We’re not advocating for people to decline invitations. That said, this research shows that the fallout from passing up an invitation won’t be nearly as bad as most of us think.
“Sometimes,” Givi said, “we’d just rather be doing something else.”
-WVU-
mm/10/21/24
MEDIA CONTACT: Micaela Morrissette
Research Writer
WVU Research Communications
304-709-6667; micaela.morrissette@mail.wvu.edu
