Chapter 2

We Assume Others Will Say No

The amount of agony we feel when asking for help depends, in part, on how likely people are to reject our request. And when it comes to figuring out that likelihood, well, frankly, we get it surprisingly wrong.

Vanessa Bohns doesn’t tell her research participants to ask strangers for favors just for the fun of watching them squirm. She does it in order to try to understand a very perplexing phenomenon: people seriously underestimate how likely others are to comply with a direct request for help.

Before she sends them out on their help-seeking missions, Bohns asks participants to guess what percentage of the strangers they approach will agree to help (or in some versions, she asks them how many people they think they’ll need to approach before one says yes). She then compares this estimate to the actual rates of helping. The differences are astounding.

In one of her studies with frequent collaborator Frank Flynn, Columbia University undergraduates were told to ask a stranger on campus for a favor—specifically, to complete a questionnaire that would take roughly five to ten minutes of their time.¹ The researchers asked the survey distributors to estimate how many people they would have to approach in order to get five completed surveys. They estimated twenty on average; the actual number was ten. The researchers repeated the experiment with two other requests: to briefly borrow a cellphone, and to be escorted to the campus gym (only a short walk away). An identical pattern emerged both times.

In yet another study, the researchers had participants engage in a kind of scavenger hunt on campus, which required them to ask strangers trivia questions on an iPad and get points for each one answered correctly.² Participants not only underestimated the number of questions people would be willing to answer (twenty-five versus forty-nine), but also underestimated the effort they would put in, in terms of the number they would answer correctly (nineteen versus forty-six), and the total time they would spend on the task.

In yet another study, this one with real-world impact, researchers asked new volunteers who were raising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to estimate the number of people they would need to contact to reach their predetermined fund-raising goal, and the average donation they would receive.³ Volunteers estimated that they would need to contact 210 potential donors, with an average donation of $48.33. In fact, they had to contact only 122 potential donors, from whom they received an average donation of $63.80.

In a recent review paper, Bohns described studies she conducted with her colleagues in which participants altogether asked more than fourteen thousand strangers for various kinds of help.⁴ She found that compliance—the rate at which people will actually help—is underestimated on average by roughly 48 percent. In other words, other people are roughly twice as likely to want to be helpful as we think they are.

This is true even when requests for help are particularly large or irritating, or possibly illegal. In one study, participants were told to go into the university library and ask strangers to write the word “pickle,” in pen, on the page of a library book.⁵ Who would do that, you wonder? Sixty-four percent of the people asked, that’s who. (The unfortunate participants who had to ask people to vandalize the books had predicted only 28 percent would agree to it.)

So, what’s going on here? Why do those seeking help seriously underestimate the likelihood of getting help? Bohns and her colleagues argue that to a large extent, it’s a failure of perspective taking. When a help seeker calculates the odds of getting help, they typically focus solely on how inconvenient or burdensome it will be for the person giving help. The more painful it is, the less likely they are to help. And that sounds logical enough, but that calculation is missing something very important. It’s missing the cost to the potential helper of saying no.

Think back to the last time someone asked you for a favor, and you said no. How did it feel? Assuming you didn’t hate the person in question, it probably felt pretty awful, didn’t it? You were probably embarrassed; you might have experienced some shame or guilt. Your self-esteem might have even gone down a notch; after all, most of us care about being good, and good people are helpful, right?

There is, in short, a whole lot of psychological, interpersonal pressure on potential help givers to say yes. And this pressure to comply is very salient to the help giver, but much less so to the help seeker. Broadly speaking, most of us aren’t very good at predicting other people’s behavior, because we aren’t natural perspective takers. Even though we have all been help givers, we fail to consider the perspective of other help givers when we most need to. As Bohns describes it, “We’re so focused on our own emotional state and our own concerns that we can’t get ourselves in the mindset of the people that we’re asking.”⁶

Help requests that are made face-to-face are the most successful, in no small part because the discomfort of saying no—the awkwardness and sense that you have violated social norms—increases exponentially. Indirect requests, like those made via email, do not cause discomfort to the same extent. However, help seekers do not usually take this into account and, when asked, prefer making indirect requests to direct ones.⁷

This underestimation-of-help effect exists everywhere, but is more pronounced in individualistic cultures like the United States and Western Europe compared to more collectivist, interdependent cultures like those in East Asia. In collectivist cultures, it seems, people are more keenly aware of the discomfort of saying no, so they calculate the odds of getting the help they seek a bit more accurately.

But it isn’t simply a question of odds; research suggests that we also underestimate the amount of effort people will put in when they do agree to help us. Social norms don’t just dictate that we help; we’re supposed to do a good job helping, too. Ignoring this, help seekers don’t expect people to go out of their way for them as much as they often do.

This is yet another reason why the motivation to ask for help isn’t what it should be. Psychologists have long noted that our motivation to do anything can be (roughly) captured by the following model:

Motivation = expectancy for success × value of succeeding

In other words, your motivation to do just about anything is a function of both (1) how likely you think you are to succeed at doing it, and (2) how much you will get out of it when you do.

In the case of asking for help, this theory suggests that being motivated to ask is a function of both the likelihood that the helper will say yes and the quality of the help you think you will receive. And we underestimate both.⁸ Combine this double miscalculation with the five kinds of threat (discussed in chapter 1) that a request for support can cause, and it’s no small wonder that most of us try to go it alone.

Bohns’s favorite part of her experiments comes at the end, when her participants return to the lab after having spent an hour asking strangers for favors: “They bound back into the lab, all smiles, and surprised that it was such an easy task. And they leave thinking people are super-helpful, and that the world is a lovely place.”⁹

When I deliberately think about it, I’ve had the same experience many times in my life. The time a stranger mailed me my wallet—with all the money still in it—after I had dropped it on a Manhattan sidewalk. The time I drove off the road into a snowy ditch, miles from anywhere that I could get a cellphone signal, and a group of men I’d never met before pulled over to the side of the road to help push my car out. The time a passerby found me while taking out the trash, cornered by a raccoon the size of a bear cub and chased it away. (Don’t judge.) Every time, I remember feeling a warm glow inside, surprised but delighted that there was so much goodness in my fellow humans. The world did indeed seem like a lovely place.

People want to be helpful. Admittedly, not all people, but far more of us than you would imagine. And if you ask for the help you need, chances are good that you will get it, and then some. Steve Jobs certainly thought so. In 1994, a few years before he returned to Apple, one of the most successful men in recent history spoke to an interviewer about why it’s so important to ask for what you need.

Underestimating the Helpfulness of People Who’ve Said No

There’s one category of person we tend to underestimate even more than the normal run-of-the-mill person: anyone who has turned down our request in the past.

Earlier in this chapter, I said that turning down a request makes people really, really uncomfortable. It makes them feel as if they might be a bad person, because people are supposed to help one another. Well, now imagine how uncomfortable it is to turn down two requests.

It’s relatively easy to find a justification for saying no once, which is why rates of helping aren’t always 100 percent. I’m terribly busy or I’m not feeling so well today works once to assuage the guilt, but it doesn’t usually work indefinitely. The second time a request is made, you need to have a really good reason to say no, or the pile of I’m-a-bad-person evidence starts to get too big to ignore. Which is why the research paints a very clear picture in this regard: people who have rejected an initial request for help are more likely to help the second time around, not less.

Take a look at the back of this book. See the quotes on the back? Those endorsements are what people in publishing call “blurbs.” Authors and publishers send out early copies of books to influential people, hoping to secure a few kind words to the effect of “People should read this book because it’s terrific,” that can then be printed on the back cover or listed on the book’s Amazon page.

I will freely admit that I hate asking for blurbs; I’m pretty sure all authors do. And I hate it for all the reasons that people hate asking for help more generally: it makes me feel embarrassed and vulnerable. But this particular book you are holding in your hands is my fifth, so I’ve been around the block a few times and can happily report that the asking gets easier.

With the first book, though, it was a bit of a nightmare for me. I literally pleaded with my agent not to make me do it. I was certain, just as Bohns would have predicted, that no one would agree to read the book, much less endorse it. But my agent insisted, and in the end (again, just as Bohns would have predicted), most of the people I asked did read it, and most said very nice things about it.

There was only one person who surprised me in a negative way—someone who I actually thought might read the book, because we have a close friend in common and knew one another a little. He ignored my request completely. I was annoyed at the time, but eventually forgot all about it, until it was time to try to get blurbs for my second book.

My agent once again sent me back out into the world to coax, cajole, and outright beg for endorsements. And he suggested I again approach the individual who had ignored me last time around. I thought he was crazy. Why in the world would I ask that guy? If he didn’t help me then, why would he help me now? But, I got an amazing blurb, one that made me blush a little from the generosity of its praise. And looking back, I can think of many times when I’ve done something similar, when I’ve gone out of my way the second time around to make up for having been too selfish, lazy, or preoccupied to give someone the help they needed the first time.

I didn’t know as much of the science on seeking help back then. So I didn’t realize how wrong I was. For instance, Daniel Newark, Frank Flynn, and Vanessa Bohns conducted a study in which they told Stanford University students to ask fifteen strangers walking between two locations on campus to fill out a one-page questionnaire. Then, regardless of whether the stranger said yes or no to the first request, the participant had to follow it up with a second request—this time, to mail a letter.

Before heading out, the participants (no doubt, filled with dread) were asked to estimate the percentage of strangers who would say yes to the second request if they had said no to the first. They estimated only 18 percent would agree to mail the letter in that case, when actually 43 percent agreed to do so. Overall, requests for help were higher for the second request than the first. It seems no one likes to look like a jerk twice; once is bad enough.

A well-known sales tactic, called the “door-in-the-face” technique, is based on this very insight.¹¹ The idea of door-in-the-face is very simple: ask for something so difficult or outrageous that you know the other person is going to say no. Then follow it up with a much more reasonable request for whatever it is you actually wanted, and you are much more likely to get it.

In one of the most cited studies demonstrating how it works, a team lead by persuasion researcher Robert Cialdini asked participants if they would be willing to serve as a Big Brother or Big Sister to juvenile delinquents.¹² The request was a significant one, as it would entail a commitment of two hours a week for two years. Not surprisingly, every participant said no. The team then asked them if they would instead be willing to chaperone a one-day trip to the zoo for the same kids.

A control group of participants received only the second request without ever hearing the first, and 17 percent of them agreed to chaperone the zoo trip. But a whopping 50 percent of the ones who had first been asked—and said no—to serve as a Big Brother/Big Sister said yes to the zoo. In other words, the likelihood of saying yes to a smaller, second request after the first is rejected nearly tripled.

(In a great Calvin and Hobbes strip, Calvin tries to use the door-in-the-face technique to his advantage. In the first two panels, he asks his mother if he can set his bed mattress on fire or ride his tricycle off the roof. “No, Calvin,” she replies each time. “Then can I have a cookie?” he asks. But she still says no. “She’s on to me,” he thinks. Which just goes to show that some subtlety in using this technique is probably helpful.)

Part of what may be happening when you use the door-in-the-face technique is something of a contrast effect: the second request seems so much smaller in comparison to the first that it no longer seems like a big deal. But the primary driver of its usefulness is clearly our sense of social responsibility—that we ought to be helpful and supportive when people ask us to be, and refusing two requests in a row made by the same person creates too much discomfort and guilt for us to bear.

This impulse to make up for our lapses in giving support is, broadly speaking, a good thing. It strengthens relationships and helps to mend ones that have become strained. When you approach someone for help who has rejected you in the past, you are not just more likely to get it; you are giving that person an opportunity to feel better about themselves, too. If you avoid seeking their help permanently, you won’t be doing either of you any favors.

You may be wondering, what happens when you ask for a second favor from someone who actually did say yes to the first one? Are they less likely to help, having helped you once already? No! They are also more likely to help the second time around, thanks to the help seekers’ friend, cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is a strange and powerful psychological phenomenon. Human beings generally exhibit a reliable need for consistency; we prefer our beliefs to align with each another, and our actions to align with those beliefs. Holding inconsistent or contradictory views of something or someone (for instance, believing that John is a good person, while knowing at the same time that John cheats on his taxes) causes a kind of psychological pain called cognitive dissonance. People describe it, when you try to get them to put it into words, as a kind of nagging discomfort or a feeling that something is wrong. The only way to resolve the dissonance and get rid of the discomfort is to change one of the conflicting views (i.e., come up with a justification for why it’s OK that John cheats on his taxes or decide that John is not actually a good person).

Helping you in the past and refusing to help you now would create an inconsistency, or contradiction, that would bring on the uncomfortable tension of cognitive dissonance. Research suggests that people will be willing to help in increasingly effortful and inconvenient ways after granting an initial request. This, too, has inspired a sales tactic that is more or less the reverse of door-in-the-face, called the foot-in-the-door technique.

To use the foot-in-the-door technique, simply ask for something relatively small or effortless that you know the other person will say yes to; once you have secured that yes, follow it up with a second, larger request. (A friend once used this on me to great success. First she asked me if she could drop off a plant at my apartment so I could water it while she was away for two weeks. I enthusiastically said, “Yes, of course!” She then followed it with a request to drop off her St. Bernard as well. I said yes and then spent almost a year finding dog hair.)

It’s somewhat astonishing that our intuitions about whether and when other people will be willing to help us, and how they will feel about us when they do, are so terribly wrong. After all, we are all help givers as well as help seekers. We know how difficult it is to say no. We know that we don’t like people less simply because they’ve asked for our help. If only we could keep all that in mind when it’s our turn to need support, the asking would be a whole lot easier.

It Helps to Remember