The question
Are we any good at predicting whether someone will say yes when we ask them for help?
The method
Six studies. Three measured predicted against actual compliance — two on campus (approach strangers and ask them to fill in a questionnaire, lend a phone, or walk you somewhere) and one in the field, following 91 charity fundraisers, some of whom asked people they knew well, from before they started asking to after their deadline. Two more manipulated whether a participant was cast as the seeker or the potential helper. The last went after the mechanism [1].
The findings
In the first three studies, “people underestimated by as much as 50% the likelihood that others would agree to a direct request for help, across a range of requests occurring in both experimental and natural field settings” [1]. In the first study, “participants overestimated the number of people they thought they would have to approach by approximately twice the number of people they actually needed to approach to complete the task (predicted: M = 20.5, SD = 12.3; actual: M = 10.5, SD = 3.9)” [2]. The field study held: fundraisers “predicted they would need to approach significantly more people (M = 210.3, SD = 271.2) than they actually needed to approach (M = 122.2, SD = 118.6)” [3]. They were wrong about size as well as count — “they predicted their supporters would contribute $48.33 on average … but the average contribution was actually $63.80 … 24% more than the predicted amount” [3].
The explanation is the useful part. Asked to price the same request, “people in the potential-helper condition gave higher percentage estimates of compliance compared with people in the help-seeker condition (49.6% vs. 34.3%)” [5]. What the seeker cannot see is the cost of refusal: “help seekers were less willing than potential helpers were to appreciate the social costs of refusing a direct request for help (the costs of saying ‘no’), attending instead to the instrumental costs of helping (the costs of saying ‘yes’)” [1].
And the consequence the authors return to in their general discussion: “many help seekers will refrain from requesting help because they would rather avoid being rejected” [4]. The error is not that you ask badly. It is that you do not ask.
The limits
The requests studied are small, immediate, and made face-to-face or by a warm route — a questionnaire, a phone, a donation to a friend’s marathon. Roghanizad and Bohns’s later work shows the effect reverses over email. Read this paper together with that one: it is the case for asking, not the case for asking by whatever channel is convenient.