NPR’s Scott Detrow talks to West Virginia University marketing professor Julian Givi about his research on the social ramifications of turning down invites.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It’s the holidays, and that means sometimes, we get invitations to events that we just can’t attend or maybe, to be real, we just do not want to attend. But we worry – some of us too much – about the impact of saying no. Will my friends be angry? Will my colleagues think I don’t want to spend time with them outside work? The anxiety can spiral. A new study suggests, though, that, actually, declining an invitation might not be as bad as you think. Julian Givi is an assistant professor of marketing at West Virginia University and one of the study’s authors. Julian, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
JULIAN GIVI: Hey. Thanks for having me.
DETROW: I thought I was, you know, unique in just always worrying about the implications of saying no and trying not to disappoint people. But I guess enough people feel this way that you have thought to do a study on it. What was the inspiration here?
GIVI: I was invited to an event, and it was someone’s wedding, you know, quite far away and quite a hassle to get to. And I really did not want to attend it, but I was like, man, I can’t say no, right? They’re going to kill me if I don’t go. And so it got me wondering, you know, if people kind of worry a little bit too much about these negative ramifications. And so I was interested – you know, do they actually exist?
DETROW: And tell me what exactly the study looked at and what you found.
GIVI: Yeah. So in the study, we basically had two groups of participants. Some were what we called inviters, and others were what we called invitees. And so if you were in an inviter condition, you imagined that you invited someone to do a social activity – so it could be, you know, going to dinner, could be attending a museum, you know, whatever. And then what we did was we had…
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