Are fears of saying ‘no’ overblown?

We can be unduly hard on ourselves as we grapple with the implications of declining an invitation. Yifei Fang/Moment via Getty Images by Julian Givi, West Virginia University and Colleen P. Kirk, New York Institute of Technology Everyone has been there. You get invited to something that you absolutely do not want to attend – a holiday party, a family cookout, an expensive trip. But doubts and anxieties creep into your head as you weigh whether to decline. You might wonder if you’ll upset the person who invited you. Maybe it’ll harm the friendship, or they won’t extend an invite to the next get-together. Should you just grit your teeth and go? Or are you worrying more than you should about saying “no”? An imaginary faux pas We explored these questions in a recently published study. In a pilot study that we ran ahead of the main studies, we found that 77% of our 51 respondents had accepted an invitation to an event that they didn’t want to attend, fearing blowback if they were to decline. They worried that saying no might upset, anger or sadden the person who invited them. They also worried that they wouldn’t be invited to...