Getting out of the moment

Chapter 1 asked you to imagine the tombola request arriving on a slip of paper, and claimed you'd have ticked no. That was a thought experiment, but researchers have run the real thing.

Mahdi Roghanizad and Vanessa Bohns had people make the same request of strangers, either face to face or by email. The face-to-face requests did far better. In a later pair of experiments they added video calls and phone calls. People are much more likely to agree to a request made in person than to one made in text, and the richer channels fell in between. The askers didn't expect any of this. They thought the channel would hardly matter, and it mattered a great deal.

One limit should be stated. In the first study the emails came from strangers, and the researchers found that part of the gap was suspicion. An email from someone you've never met looks a bit dubious, and a person on the pavement doesn't. A message from your neighbour won't look dubious, so I wouldn't expect a gap of that size between people who know each other. I'd still expect a gap, for the reason the phone study gives.

Those studies were written for people who want a yes, and their advice is to ask in person. Read them from the other side and they tell you something more useful. The request and the person being asked stay the same. Change the channel from a face to a screen, and the person being asked gets a good deal of their freedom back. The pull lives in the moment and the presence. That's the same thing the phone study showed in chapter 2, where the people who only imagined the request felt free to refuse.

You can't stop people asking you things in person. What you can do is decline to answer in person, and it takes one sentence.

"Let me check and come back to you."

I'll call this the holding line. It has several things going for it.

It's easy to say. The moment punishes a no, but it barely notices a holding line, because nothing has been refused. Your neighbour's face doesn't fall and nobody has to fill a silence. If you can't yet say no to a face, you can almost certainly say this.

It's also true. You are going to check. You'll check your diary, and you'll move the date to tomorrow as in chapter 4. You'll imagine the slip of paper, and if the case is a close one you'll ask the questions from chapter 10. None of that can be done in four seconds on a pavement, and nobody reasonable expects it to be.

And it moves your answer to the kitchen table, where you stop being the person in the laboratory and become one of the people imagining the request. You give your answer as the version of you who can weigh both sides.

There are two rules that keep the holding line honest. Put a time on it, and keep to the time. "Let me check and come back to you tomorrow evening" is a promise, and your neighbour can plan around it. A holding line with no time attached, never followed up, is the "maybe" from the last chapter. It would be the same old avoidance with a delay added. Come back within a day whenever you can, and come back even when the answer is no. The answer being no is when it matters most that you do.

The obvious objection is that this is a dodge, and that you ought to learn to say no to someone's face like an adult. In time you probably will. After you've sent a dozen considered nos and watched the sky stay where it is, the face-to-face version gets easier, and chapter 13 has words for it. But I see no virtue in doing this the hard way first. You're trying to give honest answers, and the holding line gets you there this week. The asker loses nothing by it. They get a considered answer tomorrow in place of an unreliable one today.

A second objection is that some people won't accept it. "It's only a yes or no, surely you know if you're free?" Then the answer is this. "If you need to know now, I'll have to say no. If it can wait till tomorrow, I'll check." Make that your fixed rule. An answer that someone presses you for on the spot is a no. It isn't rude. It follows from everything in chapters 2 to 5. An answer given under pressure will lean towards yes for reasons unrelated to what you want, so you correct for the lean.

Two smaller points. A phone call counts as a face. The voice and the waiting silence do the same work, so the holding line applies. And a request that arrives by message doesn't need an instant reply either. If you feel the pull as you read it, put the phone down and answer after you've done the checking. The channel helps you, and an hour's delay helps more.