Why Is It So Hard to Say No?

  Hari leans over your desk. “Can you take a quick look at this?” “Sure,” you say, before he has finished asking. Your afternoon is already full. Later, Hari asks for another favour. This time, you know the answer is no. He waits by your desk, hopeful. “I’ll try,” you say. You have not quite said yes. But you have not said no either. Why is a plain no so difficult to say? This piece looks at one thing. It looks at the moment someone asks. It describes a common pattern, not every person or every case. People do say no. In the first study below, about half of the strangers asked did, by our count. Most of the evidence comes from small favours asked of strangers. Whether the same holds for a colleague like Hari is not shown here. The studies named here were run mostly in the United States.

A no comes with more care than a yes

Some researchers study how people answer requests in everyday conversation. Sacks, Davidson and Heritage are among them. A yes tends to come at once. A no tends to come late. It often starts with a pause. It often comes with a reason or a softener: “I’d love to, but…” There is a plain reason for the extra care. A refusal can offend the other person.

A soft reply stands in for a plain no

“I’ll try.” “Let me see.” “I’ll get back to you.” These replies leave room. A plain no would close the door. Sometimes they show real uncertainty. Sometimes they are a way to avoid saying no. Does the person asking notice any of this?

The person asking tends to miss how awkward a refusal is

In 2008, Francis Flynn and Vanessa Lake tested how well people guess who will say yes. Lake is now Vanessa Bohns. In their first study, students at Columbia University had to find five strangers willing to fill in a questionnaire. Before they began, half of the students guessed how many people they would need to ask. They guessed about 20. They needed about 10. That is roughly twice as many as they needed. Their second study asked strangers for other small favours, such as lending a phone. People again expected more refusals than they got. Across the first three studies, they underestimated how often others would agree by as much as half. What explains the gap? Flynn and Lake point to the cost of refusing. In one study, people were placed in the role of the asker or the person asked. Those in the asker’s role rated a refusal as less difficult, less awkward and less embarrassing than the others did. In another study, askers focused on what saying yes would cost the other person. They gave less weight to what saying no would cost. Bohns later reviewed this work. Her review covers more than 14,000 strangers asked. It also points to the awkwardness of refusing.

Researchers give other reasons too

Other researchers give different explanations. Zhao and Epley ran studies with 2,118 adults in the United States. They found that people asking for help underrate how much others want to help. So no single reason is settled.

Our hypothesis: the reply hides the awkwardness

Our interpretation, not an established finding. The studies above do not test it directly. It offers one possible reason for one part of the picture. People have asked for favours all their lives. Yet in the studies, they still guessed too low. Why does the guess not improve? The studies do not say. We suggest it is because the asker mostly sees the reply. “Sure.” “I’ll try.” “Let me see.” A reply shows the answer. It does not show how hard the answer was to give. A reluctant yes can sound like an easy yes. A soft no can sound like a maybe. So the asker rarely sees what a no costs. People asking expect more refusals than they get. Our hypothesis is that the replies they hear hide how hard a refusal is. A yes is easy to hear. The difficulty of a no often goes unseen.

Glossary

• A proposed explanation. Here it is our interpretation of the research, not a finding the studies tested.
• Our own interpretation, built from the research above.

Sources

• Bohns, V. K. (2016). (Mis)understanding our influence over others: a review of the underestimation-of-compliance effect. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(2), 119–123. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721415628011 Abstract read; full text not.
• Davidson, J. (1984). Subsequent versions of invitations, offers, requests, and proposals dealing with potential or actual rejection. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action (pp. 102–128). Cambridge University Press. Cited from an overview of the field; the chapter itself was not read.
• Flynn, F. J., & Lake, V. K. B. (2008). If you need help, just ask: underestimating compliance with direct requests for help. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(1), 128–143. Lake is now Vanessa Bohns. The “about half” in the opening is our calculation from the reported counts: five agreements in about 10.5 requests.
• Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Polity Press. Cited from an overview of the field; the book itself was not read.
• Sacks, H. (1987). On the preferences for agreement and contiguity in sequences in conversation. In G. Button & J. R. E. Lee (Eds.), Talk and Social Organisation (pp. 54–69). Multilingual Matters. Cited from an overview of the field; the chapter itself was not read.
• Zhao, X., & Epley, N. (2022). Surprisingly happy to have helped: underestimating prosociality creates a misplaced barrier to asking for help. Psychological Science, 33(10), 1708–1731. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221097615 Abstract read; full text not.