"It would look like I don't trust them"

Some requests are hard to refuse for a particular reason. A no seems to say something rude about the person asking.

A friend has started selling skincare products and asks if you'd like to host an evening for her. A colleague wants to borrow your car for the weekend. Someone you half know asks if they can stay in your spare room for a week while their flat is being done. A man on your doorstep with a lanyard and a clipboard says it's only three pounds a month. In each case there's the usual awkwardness, and on top of it there's a second worry. If you say no to the car, aren't you saying he's a bad driver? If you turn down the skincare evening, aren't you saying her new business is a bit embarrassing? If you refuse the man with the clipboard, aren't you as good as calling him a crook?

Sunita Sah, George Loewenstein and Daylian Cain have studied a version of this and given it a name, insinuation anxiety. Their setting was advice. They looked at what happens when an adviser, such as a doctor, discloses a conflict of interest. An example would be a doctor who gets a fee for every patient referred to a particular trial. You'd expect the disclosure to make people warier of the advice, and it did. People trusted the advice less. But it also made them feel more pressure to follow it. Once the conflict had been mentioned, turning the advice down felt like an accusation. It would have implied that the doctor was biased by the fee. The researchers found this in four experiments, three built on medical scenarios and one a field experiment with real money at stake. It held whether the conflict was large or small. It weakened when someone other than the adviser made the disclosure, which suggests the pressure comes from having the person in front of you.

So people went along with advice they trusted less, so as not to seem distrustful. That's the unwilling yes in a white coat.

Carrying this over from advice to favours is my step, so treat it as an interpretation. But I think the same thing is happening with the car and the spare room. The request has got tangled up with the person. A no to the thing feels like a verdict on them, and since you don't hold that verdict, or wouldn't dream of delivering it, you say yes.

It helps to separate them again, and one way of doing that works better than any other I know. Have a policy.

"I don't lend the car to anyone. It's nothing personal, it's the insurance." "We don't do anything at the door, but good luck with it." "I don't host selling evenings, but I hope it goes well. Tell me how you get on." A policy is a decision you made before this person turned up, which applies to everybody. It can't be a comment on him, because it would have been the same for anyone. Most people hear that at once. A policy is also easier to say than a judgment made on the spot, because you aren't deciding anything in front of them. You're reporting something already settled.

The objection is that this sounds like a trick, a way of hiding behind a rule. It's only a trick if the policy is invented on the spot. I'm suggesting the reverse. Sit down on some quiet evening and work out what your policies are. Most people have three or four areas where requests keep coming and the answer, on reflection, is always the same. Common ones are lending money, lending the car, buying at the door, having people to stay and joining committees. Decide the answer once, at your kitchen table, with nobody waiting. Then when the request comes, the deciding has been done by someone calmer than the person on the doorstep.

You can hold a policy and still make exceptions. If your brother's car is off the road and he needs to get to a funeral, you'll lend him yours. That's you choosing, which is the point of the whole book. A policy only takes care of the ordinary case so that you don't have to decide it four seconds at a time.