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RESEARCHERS

The Science of People-Pleasing: Why Saying No Costs Less Than Your Brain Predicts

3 the researchers behind it — The people-pleasing script says the friendship survives only as long as you keep saying yes, keep quiet, and keep everyone comfortable. Forty years of

Carnegie Mellon University

Vicki S. Helgeson

Known for:The theory of unmitigated communion — distinguishing healthy caring from self-erasing focus on others

Key findings

  1. 1998

    Unmitigated communion — focus on others to the exclusion of the self — is theorized as a distinct orientation with two components, overinvolvement with others and neglect of the self, and is associated with poorer psychological and physical health outcomes. ↗

  2. 2015

    In a daily diary study, people high in unmitigated communion reported more daily interpersonal stressors and distress, linking the trait to day-to-day interpersonal behavior and lower wellbeing rather than to caring itself. ↗

Carnegie Mellon University (at time of key publications)

Heidi L. Fritz

Known for:Empirically separating unmitigated communion from ordinary communion — showing self-neglect, not caring, predicts distress

Key findings

  1. 1998

    Across student and cardiac-patient samples, unmitigated communion — but not communion — was related to psychological distress, and its signature behaviors were self-neglect and overinvolvement with others' problems. ↗

  2. 1999

    Unmitigated communion is empirically distinct from communion: it correlates with a negative view of the self and dependence on others' approval, whereas communion correlates with positive relationship quality — the constructs must not be collapsed into 'being caring'. ↗

Cornell University

Vanessa K. Bohns

Known for:Research on the underestimation-of-compliance effect — how hard it is to say no, and how badly we predict others' yeses and our own

Key findings

  1. 2008

    In experimental and field studies, help seekers underestimated by as much as 50% the likelihood that others would agree to a direct request — because they attended to the instrumental costs of helping while underweighting the social costs of refusing. ↗

  2. 2016

    Reviewing over a decade of studies, the underestimation-of-compliance effect is robust: targets of requests agree in part because refusing feels awkward and costly in the moment — the same discomfort that keeps chronic yes-sayers saying yes. ↗

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