Saying No: The Negative Ramifications From Invitation Declines Are Less Severe Than We Think

People are frequently invited to join others for fun social activities. They may be invited to lunch, to attend a sporting event, to watch the season finale of a television show, and so forth. Invitees-those who are on the receiving ends of invitations-sometimes accept invitations from inviters-those who extend invitations-but other times, invitees decline. Unfortunately, saying no can be hard, leading invitees to accept invitations when they would rather not. The present work sheds light on one factor that makes it so hard to decline invitations. We demonstrate that invitees overestimate the negative ramifications that arise in the eyes of inviters following an invitation decline. Invitees have exaggerated concerns about how much the decline will anger the inviter, signal that the invitee does not care about the inviter, make the inviter unlikely to offer another invitation in the future, and so forth. We also demonstrate that this asymmetry emerges in part because invitees exaggerate the degree to which inviters focus on the decline itself, as opposed to the thoughts ran through the invitee's head before deciding. Indeed, across multiple studies, we find support for this process through mediation and moderation, while simultaneously finding evidence against multiple alternative accounts. We conclude with a discussion of the contributions and limitations of this research, along with directions for future work.