If you’d rather spend an evening in your pajamas than go to the office Christmas party, you can breathe a sigh of relief: researchers say hosts tend to be more understanding about rejections than expected.
Researchers in the US have found that while people often worry that declining an invitation will upset the host and lead to fewer invitations in the future, their fears tend to be exaggerated.
“Although it may seem as though all the naysayer will consider is the fact that you refused, they are likely to consider much more, making the negative consequences less severe than you think,” the authors write.
the study room, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychologyinvolved five experiments involving more than 2,000 participants.
In the first experiment, 382 online participants were divided into two groups. One group was asked to read aloud an invitation from a hypothetical friend to an exhibit at a local museum that weekend, and imagine declining by explaining that they just wanted to stay home and relax. Some participants were told that they were the only person invited, while others were told that multiple invitations had been given.
Those invited were then asked to rate on a scale how severe they thought the potential consequences would be, including how angry they thought the host would be, how much the host would think they didn’t care, and to what extent they thought. the rejection would lead to fewer invitations in the future.
The other group was asked to pretend to be the host, and rate how they would feel about a rejection.
The results revealed that regardless of the number of people participants were told they were invited, those who declined the invitation tended to rate expected outcomes as more negative than hosts, both in terms of how the host would feel and whether the rejection would lead to fewer invitations – or the host rejecting invitations from them.
“Across our experiments, we consistently found that invitees overestimate the negative consequences that arise in the eyes of invitees after a decline in invitations,” said Dr. Julian Givi, lead author of the study at West Virginia University.
Indeed, the team found that the findings held even when the host and invitee were in an actual relationship.
However, another experiment revealed that participants’ anxiety about declining an invitation dropped when they first rejected their own invitation by someone else.
In further scenarios, the team gauged how participants acting as third-party observers would expect a rejection to be taken, and examined the extent to which a host would, or would be expected to, focus on the rejection itself versus the invitees’ deliberations behind it.
The results suggest that worry about rejection of invitations is not driven by an inflated sense of self-importance, or thoughts about future invitations, but is due to people thinking a host will focus more on the rejection than the reasoning involved .
The team says the findings have real-world implications.
“Our studies suggest that the negative effects of invitations are not as bad as invitees think,” the team writes, “and that they could probably pass on more invitations than they currently do.”
