The awkwardness is real

A book like this could start by telling you that the discomfort of saying no is all in your head and you should get over it. I'm not going to say that, because it isn't true. The pull towards yes is one of the better-measured things in social psychology, and it's a good deal stronger than most people would guess.

Here's the study I find most striking. Roseanna Sommers and Vanessa Bohns brought people into a laboratory one at a time, and an experimenter made an outrageous request. Would they unlock their phone and hand it over, so the experimenter could look through it while they waited in another room? A second group of people was only asked to imagine the situation. Most of that second group said a reasonable person would refuse. I expect you'd say so too. I would.

Of the 103 people who were asked for real, 100 unlocked their phones and handed them over.

Afterwards, the people who'd been asked said they had felt less free to refuse than the imaginers thought they would. In a second study the experimenter told people plainly that they had the right to say no. It made no significant difference to how many complied.

Think about what that involved. There was no threat, no reward and no friendship at stake. The experimenter was a stranger they'd never see again. Their messages, photographs and search history were on that phone. They still handed it over, because a person was standing in front of them, had asked politely, and was waiting.

Bohns has run many studies of this kind. In one set, with Mahdi Roghanizad and Amy Xu, students were sent out to ask other students to tell a small lie or to commit a small act of vandalism. Before they went, they predicted how easy it would be to get people to agree. It was easier than they predicted. The researchers' explanation was that the askers failed to see how uncomfortable it is to refuse a suggestion from someone standing in front of you. In an earlier series with Francis Flynn, people who were about to ask strangers for favours underestimated how many would agree by as much as half. The askers were thinking about what a yes would cost the other person. The person being asked was busy feeling what a no would cost.

I take two things from this.

The first is that you're not unusually weak. If nearly every person in a laboratory will hand a stranger their unlocked phone, then agreeing to run a tombola for a neighbour you'll see every week is no defect of character. People do this. The you who'd tick no on the slip of paper is like the group who imagined the request. The you on the pavement is like the group who got it for real. Both are you, and the gap between them is ordinary.

The second is that the pull sits in a particular place. It's in the moment, with a person present. The people who imagined the request felt free to refuse because nobody was standing there. Hold on to that, because the practical half of this book depends on it.

Why is the pull so strong? Here I'm giving you my own reading and not a finding. Conversations run on small expectations. A greeting expects a greeting back, a question expects an answer, and a request expects a yes. A no breaks the pattern, and the break is felt straight away, in the body, by both people. We've had a long time to get good at staying on the right side of whoever is in front of us, and mostly that's a fine thing. It's why queues work and strangers hold doors. The unwilling yes is what happens when that useful reflex meets a request that costs eight hours.

Underneath the reflex there are real needs, and I won't pretend otherwise. You want to be on good terms with the people around you. You want to be thought kind, and to be kind. You want your street, your office and your family to be places where people help each other. None of that is foolish, and nothing in this book asks you to give it up.

What I'm going to do is ask some narrower questions. What does the unwilling yes buy you, and what does it cost? Is your forecast of what a no would do any good? Does the yes serve those real needs as well as you think? And is there a way to give your answer somewhere other than in those four seconds?