Why am I a people pleaser?

Most people pleasers don’t say yes because they love helping. They say it because no feels so awkward face to face, and because they expect a no to cost far more than it does. One ordinary day shows how fast those yeses add up.

The report nobody wants

A colleague leans over your desk. “Could you take the Thursday report? I’m buried.” You hear yourself say “Sure, no problem” before you’ve even looked at your own week.

The person asking had probably braced for a no. In studies where volunteers asked more than 14,000 strangers for small favours, the askers guessed far too low. As a rough picture: for every 10 people who said yes, askers had expected only about 5 to agree.¹ The researchers traced much of that gap to something the askers kept forgetting, which is how awkward it feels to turn someone down to their face.²

That awkwardness is what you skipped. In return you gave up two evenings this week, and your colleague now knows whose desk to come to first.

A text about Saturday

A message from your partner: their old friends are in town, dinner on Saturday, okay? You had been looking forward to a weekend with nothing in it. You type “sounds great!” and add an exclamation mark you don’t feel.

About 3 in 4 people in one survey said they had done the same thing: gone along with an invitation they didn’t want, because they worried what saying no would do. The researchers then put that worry to the test in five experiments with more than 2,000 people.³

People who said no to a fun plan, like a dinner out, guessed the other person would be quite angry, would decide they didn’t care, and might not invite them again. The people who had invited them felt much milder than that. One reason is where each side looks. The person saying no expects the other to fix on the no itself, while the person inviting thinks more about why you said it.⁴ Couples showed the same pattern.³

So Saturday evening is booked. You’ll spend it smiling across a restaurant table, and your partner will go home thinking you enjoy these dinners, which makes the next one more likely.

Your mother’s Sunday

Your mother calls. Could you drive her to see her sister on Sunday? It’s two hours each way. “Of course, no problem.” That’s three.

Psychologists who study self-esteem think that how you feel about yourself rises and falls with how wanted you feel by the people around you. When that sense of being wanted drops, you feel worse about yourself and lean toward whatever might win approval back.⁵ A large review of the research called the need to belong one of the most basic things humans want, and found that people form bonds easily and fight hard not to lose them.⁶

No study has measured whether a no to family feels worse than other noes. It’s easy to see why it might: of everyone you talk to today, she is the one you could never swap for someone else. Sunday was the one day you had kept free. Now it’s four hours in a car.

Seven thumbs in the group chat

Someone in your friends’ group chat suggests a weekend away next month. Six thumbs-up appear in a row. You can’t really afford it and you don’t much want to go. You add the seventh thumb.

Nobody even asked you directly. A tiny online game shows how strong this pull can be. You toss a ball back and forth with two other players, and after a while they stop throwing it to you. In one early version, the other two players were really run by a computer, and nobody had met them. Even so, the more often people were left out, the worse they felt and the less they felt they belonged. In a follow-up, people who had just been left out were more likely to go along with a group on the next task.⁷

A 2015 review pooled 120 studies with this game, nearly 12,000 people in all. Across them, being left out stung, whatever people’s age, gender or country.⁸

So the pull to go along doesn’t need a long history with a group. A few minutes of being ignored by strangers was enough to make people feel worse, and to make them fall in with the group on the next task.⁷

The jacket

In a shop, the assistant brings you a jacket. It’s the wrong green and a bit tight across the shoulders. She tells you it looks amazing. “It’s lovely,” you say. “I’ll take it.” You will never see this woman again.

Feeling pushed out tends to send people one of two ways. Some turn extra friendly and helpful, as if trying to mend things. Others get angry or pull away.⁹ Paying for a jacket you don’t like, just to keep a stranger smiling, looks a lot like the first way, only smaller.

In one small brain-scan study, people were scanned while they were being left out of the ball game. An area that also responds to physical pain became more active, most of all in the people who felt most upset.¹⁰ That might be why a stranger’s small letdown can sting. But it was one small study, and it can’t tell us exactly what that brain activity means.

The friend who is moving

A friend texts. The move is on Saturday morning: could you come early and bring the car? You’ll be tired at that dinner. You say yes anyway, and this time something is different. You want to. This is the friend who carried a sofa up four floors for you last spring.

Plenty of yeses are good ones. Researchers separate two habits that look alike from the outside. One is caring about other people, which is healthy. The other is focusing on others so completely that your own needs drop out of the picture.¹¹ In four studies that tracked links rather than causes, it was the second habit that went with a harsher view of yourself, judging your worth by what others think, and more distress.¹²

You’d give this yes even if saying no were free. It’s the only one today you thought about first.

“Are you awake?”

Your phone lights up on the pillow. Someone wants to talk, now, about a long story you’ve heard before. You were nearly asleep. You type “yeah of course, what’s up?”

Nights like this are often when you go looking for a word for it all. You’ll find “people pleaser” and a newer one, “fawning”, often described as a reaction to trauma. Neither is a diagnosis. “Fawning” came from a therapist’s writing in 2003, based on his own clients rather than studies,¹³ and there still isn’t much research on it.¹⁴ Use either word, if it helps, as a handy name for something you notice in your own days.

Add up the day. Two evenings on someone else’s report. A Saturday dinner you didn’t want. Four hours in a car on your only free day. A weekend away you can’t afford. A jacket you won’t wear. And now an hour of sleep, on a night you were already tired.

Which no is safest to try first?

Leave your mother and your colleague for later. Start with an invitation to something fun that you don’t feel like doing, like a dinner or an outing. That is the kind of no the studies tested, and the people inviting took it better than the people saying no expected.⁴ In those studies the reason given was simply wanting to stay home and relax, and the people inviting still minded less than expected.³ So give a reason, and make it a true one.

Have the words ready before you need them, because finding them on the spot is part of what makes no so hard. In two lab studies, people who were handed a simple sentence for saying no felt their choice was more freely made, more so than people who were only told they were allowed to refuse. The study’s own title puts it this way: giving people the words to say no leads them to feel freer to say yes.¹⁵

Something like: “Thanks for thinking of me. I’m going to stay in this time, but please ask me again.”

Sources (15)

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