Why "Maybe" Can Be Ruder Than "No"

"Maybe, I'll let you know" can feel like the kind reply to an invitation. But the friend making the plans may see it differently. We follow a dinner invitation through research on "maybe" and "no": why invited people overestimate how welcome a tentative answer will be, how keeping our own options open can shape what we think others want, and why a clear decline can feel riskier than it really is. In this video: A polite little "maybe," seen from both sides of the phone What inviters actually preferred: "maybe" or "no" The seat that stays open while someone waits The restaurant experiment that changed what people predicted Motivated reasoning: when our wishes shape our guesses Why saying "no" feels so risky What happened when people tried the other side first How to answer when you genuinely don't know yet Chapters: 0:00 A Polite Little Maybe 0:47 What the Other Person Actually Wants 1:39 Keeping an Option Has a Cost 2:24 When Your Preference Becomes Their Preference 3:31 Why No Feels So Risky 4:31 Try the Other Side of the Phone 5:32 Give the Plan an Answer Sources & further reading: Givi, Kirk, Grossman & Sedikides (2025), "Maybe don't say 'maybe': How and why invitees fail to realize that they should not respond to invitations with a 'maybe'." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 121, 104814. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2025.1... Author-hosted full text: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~crsi/G... Givi & Kirk (2024), "Saying no: The negative ramifications from invitation declines are less severe than we think." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 126(6), 1103–1115. First published online in December 2023. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000443 Kunda (1990), "The case for motivated reasoning." Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.108... The percentages in the video come from individual experiments in the 2025 paper (Experiments 2, 4 and 5), in which American participants responded to written scenarios. Maya's dinner and the messages shown are illustrative examples. The suggestion to let an inviter go ahead without you is the authors' practical advice, not an approach their studies tested. #Psychology #SocialPsychology #HumanBehavior