Do you want to decline the invitation? Science says: Say “no” without fear | behavior

Researchers say the negative consequences of declining that unwanted invitation are much less serious than we might expect. More than 77% of survey participants were posted on Journal of Personality and Social Psychology On December 11, they stated that they had accepted an invitation to participate in an activity that they did not want to participate in as a way to avoid the consequences of refusal.

To evaluate whether there was any basis for fear of rejection, five experiments were conducted on more than two thousand people in total. In it, participants were put in a scenario where they had to invite or decline an invitation and explain how they felt about the situation.

In one experiment, participants were invited or invited to dinner on a Saturday night at a restaurant with a famous chef. Guests were asked to decline the proposal on the grounds that they already had plans for the day and wanted to spend the evening relaxing at home. This information was passed on to those who believed they had made the invitation.

Thus, the researchers understood that those who declined the invitation believed that this action would have negative consequences for the relationship and that the friend would feel disappointed and tend not to invite them to future events. Furthermore, they believed that their friend would focus more on the rejection itself than on the reasons that led to it.

In another experiment, 160 people participated in a “couples survey”, with couples who had been together for a maximum of six months, between six and 12 months, five years and more than 5 years. Thus, one pair was invited to leave the research room while the other stayed and wrote an invitation to do an activity in the following weeks.

After that, they switch places, and the partner who was previously out of the room will have to write a refusal of the invitation saying that he prefers to stay at home and relax.

Similar to the previous experiment, the person who declined the invitation tended to believe that their partner was more likely to feel that rejection meant they did not care about the other person — regardless of the length of the relationship.

“Although there were times when I felt a little annoyed by someone who declined an invitation, our research gives us a lot of good reasons to predict that people overestimate the negative consequences for our relationships,” says Julian Giffey, an assistant professor at Harvard University. Western University of Virginia, USA. In the current situation.

“Don’t be afraid to decline invitations here and there. But remember that spending time with others is how relationships develop, so don’t decline every invitation,” he concluded, highlighting invitations to attend holiday events.