Which of your yeses did you mean?

Five kinds of people who ask

Each moment is a small ask from someone in your life: a colleague, a partner, family, a friend or a stranger. You pick one of three answers. A yes you mean, a yes you don’t mean, or a no, which also covers offering something smaller or different. Saying no to the fundraiser at your door and saying no to your parent on the phone are very different, so each kind of person gets its own count.

A yes you mean is fine. The tricky one is the other kind, because the person asking hears the same word either way, and only you know which yes it was. Sometimes a yes you don’t mean is still worth giving, like helping a friend through a hard week, so the counts only show where your unwanted yeses happen. Whether each one was worth it is for you to judge.

We wrote these moments ourselves and haven’t tried them on a large group of people, so there is nothing to compare your answers with and no score at the end. You get your own answers back, grouped by who was asking. With only 2 or 3 moments for each kind of person, one answer changes a count a lot. Tapping an answer on your phone is also easier than saying it to someone’s face, and in real life the “I’d rather not” often only shows up an hour after you’ve said yes. If a count feels wrong, go with what you know about yourself.

A no usually costs less than you fear

Saying no to someone’s face feels so awkward that many people say yes just to avoid it. That’s one reason people who ask for small favours get far more yeses than they expect.¹

The no itself tends to land softer than you’d think. In a set of experiments, people who said no to an invitation expected the host to mind much more than the host really did.² Before those experiments, about 3 in 4 people in a first survey said they had once gone to something they didn’t want to, because they were worried about saying no.³

One idea from research on self-esteem may explain why that worry is so strong. It says the way we feel about ourselves works a bit like a fuel gauge for how accepted we feel: when acceptance seems to drop, so does how good we feel about ourselves.⁴ If that’s right, even a tiny no can feel risky.

Where to start

Take the kind of person where you most often said a yes you didn’t mean, and pick the smallest moment there. Next time it comes up, offer something smaller than a full yes, like calling back tomorrow instead of now. Then notice what actually happens, and compare it with what you expected.