"They'll say no"

You need to be at the airport for six in the morning. It's an invented example, though you may have lived it. You go through the people who could drive you. Sam has the kids. Priya has just started a new job. Dan did you a favour in March. Your sister would do it, but she'd be tired all day. You book a taxi for sixty pounds.

Nobody turned you down. You turned yourself down five times, on behalf of five people, without any of them knowing there'd been a question. The habit relies on this. It doesn't need anyone to refuse you as long as you can imagine them doing it.

So it's worth knowing how good people are at predicting refusals. This has been tested many times. The answer is that they're poor at it, and when they ask in person they're wrong in one direction.

In a set of studies by Francis Flynn and Vanessa Bohns, who published at the time as Vanessa Lake, students at Columbia University had to go out and make requests of strangers. Before they went, they estimated how many people they'd need to approach. To get five strangers to fill in a questionnaire, they guessed they'd need to ask about twenty. They needed about ten. To borrow a stranger's mobile phone three times, they guessed ten and needed six. To get one stranger to walk them to the campus gym, they guessed seven and needed two or three. Volunteers raising money for a charity expected to approach about 210 people to reach their target, and reached it after about 120.

Bohns went on to run many more studies of this kind, and in 2016 she added up the results. By then her participants had made requests of more than 14,000 strangers, and on average they'd underestimated how many would agree by about half.

The researchers' explanation is about where each side is looking. When you're the one asking, you think about what it'll cost the other person in time and trouble. The person being asked is thinking about something else, which is how awkward and unkind it would feel to refuse. You're weighing their Saturday morning. They're weighing what kind of person says no to a friend with a suitcase.

These studies have limits and I don't want to hide them. The requests were small. Most were put to strangers, face to face, by American students, and some students dropped out before asking anyone. When the request was made by flyer or by email to a stranger, the effect reversed and people overestimated their chances. So the finding is about asking a person directly. It doesn't show that any request made by any route will succeed.

You may have some objections, and I think they're fair ones.

The first is that these were strangers and small favours, and what you need is a morning of your sister's time. That's true, and large favours between people who know each other have been studied less. But consider which way closeness is likely to push. Your sister knows you and loves you, and will see you at Christmas. She has more reasons to say yes than a stranger on a pavement in New York has.

The second is that a yes from someone who couldn't face refusing isn't a yes you want. I agree. The next chapter has evidence on what helpers say they feel, and it's more cheerful than you'd expect. Chapter 10 is about asking in a way that leaves people a real chance to decline.

The third is that some people will refuse. They will, and chapter 11 is about that. I'm not claiming here that everyone says yes. I'm claiming that your forecast is a forecast, that forecasts of this kind run about twice as gloomy as the facts, and that you've been spending sixty pounds on taxis because of it.

You can test this on yourself. The next few times you think about asking for something, write down your guess first, as a chance out of ten that they'll agree. Then ask, and write down what happened. After five or six of these you'll have evidence about your own forecasts.