麻豆传媒

News — Research by a behavioral expert shows many people won’t ask to join others’ plans because they think — often wrongly — that “self-invitations” tend to be resented. 

, associate professor of at the , conducted eight experimental studies testing people’s assumptions and reactions to the act of inviting oneself along on activities others have planned.

He and his coauthors published the results in the .

“Imagine you’re texting with a friend who casually mentions they have plans to go hiking next weekend with a mutual friend,” Givi said. “You’d love to join, but you hesitate to ask, given the concerns running through your head: ‘Will asking to join irritate or offend my friends? They didn’t invite me when they made the plans, so maybe they don’t want me there.’”

Givi’s research demonstrates people are more open to their friends asking to tag along on plans than those friends expect. It also shows hang-ups usually keep friends from inviting themselves along on each other’s activities.

According to Givi, that’s unfortunate, given the psychological and health benefits of participating in social activities. The study data demonstrate that friends, family members and loved ones often prefer others to ask to join their plans, and in many cases fail to invite them simply because it didn’t cross their minds or because they didn’t realize the activity would be of interest.

“When we make plans with someone, we have to think about what to do, how long it’s going to take, when we’re doing it, how we’re getting there, how much it will cost — many considerations that make it easy to forget to invite additional people along. We know this from making plans ourselves, but we forget it when we’re excluded from others’ plans. That’s part of our somewhat egocentric tendency to overestimate how much other people consider us or pay attention to us in general,” Givi said.

“Our hesitation to self-invite is linked to our reluctance, as a society, to intrude on others, a reluctance that’s based on faulty predictions we make about others’ reactions. We hesitate to ask for help or to talk to strangers, for example, because we fail to realize how open people are to those ‘intrusions.’” 

Participants in the studies were asked to recollect or imagine situations in which they invited themselves to join others’ plans or in which others asked to join their plans. They indicated their own levels of irritation, annoyance or offense in those scenarios, and attempted to predict the extents to which others would experience those reactions. Participants also documented their assumptions about factors like the probability they hadn’t been invited to join an activity because the planners had discussed inviting them but had decided against it.

Some studies tested other possible mechanisms that might contribute to a reluctance to self-invite.

“Social psychology research demonstrates that people tend to underestimate the likelihood that our requests will be granted, so a general pessimism about getting what we ask for could have been contributing to the anxiety around self-invitations,” Givi explained.

“It might also have been the case that pragmatic worries about how their participation could complicate the logistics of the event — such as how and when everyone would meet up — underlaid some participants’ decisions not to self-invite. And there was a chance that some study participants had claimed to be more open to having friends ask to join their plans than they would truly be in real life.”

However, even when participants responded to several vignettes that eliminated those possibilities, they continued to avoid self-invitations themselves while largely welcoming self-invitations by others.

Givi pointed out some exceptions to the rule that most people appreciate others inviting themselves along. For instance, his research focuses on people who have established relationships, not people who have just met.

And he considers self-invitations to everyday activities like seeing a movie or grabbing lunch, rather than large-scale, structured activities like weddings or baby showers, which almost always involve formal invitations.

“Certainly one takeaway from our work is that we should all worry a tad less about annoying our friends and could start asking to join plans more often,” Givi said. “Another is that when we’re talking to someone about our plans, we should consider inviting them rather than letting it slip our minds, knowing how unlikely they are to invite themselves no matter how much they’d like to come.”