Before Cairo Wakes

The real price of saying yes

Your neighbour catches you at the door on Thursday evening. He needs help moving furniture on Friday morning. You had plans with your children. You hear yourself say yes. You close the door and feel a small anger, mostly at him.

The anger is aimed at the wrong person. He asked once. He would have survived a no. You are the one who said yes.

Almost everyone does this. The interesting part is that we do it for a reason we cannot see while it is happening.

What the research found

Vanessa Bohns is a social psychologist at Cornell University. For about fifteen years she has run a simple kind of experiment. She takes people and asks them to guess how many strangers would agree to a small request. Sign this petition. Lend me your phone. Fill in this form. The people make their guess. Then they go out and actually ask.

They are wrong almost every time, and always in the same direction. In her 2016 review of this work, across many studies, people underestimated how many would say yes by about 48 percent.

Why we get it so wrong

Bohns' explanation is the useful part. When you are the one asking, you feel your own awkwardness. You do not feel theirs.

Refusing someone to their face is uncomfortable in a specific way. You have to reject the person a little, not just the request. There is no clean script for it. Yes has a script, one word, and the conversation ends. No needs a reason, and a reason invites an argument, and now you are negotiating when you only wanted to eat your dinner.

So people take the cheap exit. They say yes to avoid thirty seconds of discomfort, and pay for it with a Friday morning.

The strongest case against this: sometimes you say yes because you actually want to, and calling that weakness is wrong. Bohns is not saying every yes is a failure. She is saying you cannot tell the difference in the moment, because the discomfort of refusing is pressing on you while you decide. Remove that pressure and some of your yeses survive. Many do not.

The part that reverses everything

Normal advice stops here and tells you to say no more often. Bohns' research says something stranger, and most people miss it.

If refusing is that hard, then every yes you receive is also weaker than it looks. Your friend who agreed to help. The employee who said the deadline was fine. Your child who said he did not mind. Some of them were just avoiding the same thirty seconds you avoid.

And the same finding says you should ask for more, not less. People agree far more often than you fear. The favour you have been too shy to request, the discount you did not ask for, the help you decided not to bother anyone with. The odds were better than you believed. Most people get this backwards twice. They say yes too much and they ask too little.

Where it shows up

Money. Every yes to a monthly commitment is a yes to all twelve months. At 14.9 percent inflation, a payment you agreed to once keeps taking a bigger bite of a salary that grows more slowly. The lending of money to relatives sits here too. Most of it starts with a yes nobody wanted to give.

Family. The people you love have the weakest claim on your calendar, because they ask least aggressively. A man who says yes to every cousin, every colleague and every neighbour is handing his wife and children what is left over. Nobody decides this. It accumulates.

Work. The person who says yes to everything becomes the person everything is given to. That is not the same as the person who gets promoted. Those are usually two different people, and the first one is tired.

The same reflex operates in a negotiation. When someone tells you your proposal sounds good and to send it over, that is often the sound of a person avoiding an awkward refusal, not a person who wants what you are selling. Agreement is cheap. Treat it as weak evidence.

Three things to try

1. Never answer a request in the moment. Say "let me check and get back to you tonight." One sentence, and it removes the pressure that manufactures false yeses. You will refuse more, and you will mean the yeses you keep.
2. Say what it costs before you agree. Not "can I do this" but "what am I giving up to do this". Name the thing you are giving up out loud. Half the yeses die there.
3. Ask for one thing you have been avoiding. This week. The research says the odds are roughly twice what you think.