6 Ways to Turn Someone Down, Politely

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There are hundreds of instances in which a favor that seems like a favor to the person making the offer isn’t one to the potential recipient. Before blurting out “No, thank you,” examine your motives: Some people have trouble being offered help in general because they don’t feel they deserve it. In other cases, the favor involves a matter of personal preference such as someone offering you a piece of cake while you’re trying to cut down on sugar. If you’re in a meeting or restaurant that’s ice cold, and a relative stranger offers to lend you a jacket, you may just feel like you’d rather not put on someone else’s clothes. When money is involved, all bets are off because so much depends on who, what, and why as well as what you might be expected to do in return.

Some favors are inappropriately offered, reflecting a lack of insight on the part of the person making the offer. A neighbor asks how you’re doing and you say “OK," and even though you’re not, your neighbor would not necessarily be doing you a favor by noting that you don’t actually look OK and offering to give you a hug.

In all of these cases, deciding what you object to about the unsolicited offer should help guide your response. It’s possible that, upon further reflection, you decide to accept the offer after all: Maybe you could use a little sugar boost or your shoulders are turning to icicles.

But if you’re still unable to bring yourself to accept, it's time to move to your actual response.

Research on favors tends to focus on how to ask for, not turn down, the offer of a favor. For example, in the “legitimization of the paltry favor (LPF)” phenomenon, you let someone know what you’re asking for, such as donation to a crowd-funding campaign you’re running. You let a colleague know that you’re trying to raise money for your honeymoon and say that “any amount will help.” This makes the amount seem “paltry” and therefore makes it difficult for the colleague to refuse. It seems like a legitimate request, and it’s small in total amount, so you would find it to be difficult or awkward to refuse to help.

The underlying basis for the LPF is that people don’t want to seem cheap or unwilling to help. In the original formulation of the LPF in the 1970s, Arizona State University social psychologist Robert Cialdini and collaborators set out to show that the best way to get a favor is to make a small request which your target will find difficult to refuse. In a recent study on the LPF, California State University’s Jessica Russell teamed up with Michigan State University’s Franklin Boster (2015) to investigate the role of impression management on the effect. In other words, people will accede to the small favor because they want to appear in a favorable light. They will be especially likely to do so, Russell and Boster found, when the favor being requested benefits a prosocial cause and the person requesting is also giving his or her own donation—you especially don’t want to look cheap when it’s a good cause and the person asking you is also contributing.

Now let’s look at the flip side of the equation: You’re being asked to allow someone to help you, i.e., do a favor for you, but you don’t want to accept. There is no reason to think twice about saying no other than that you don’t want to look like an ingrate. You want to manage your impression as a person who expresses gratitude and is therefore decent and honorable. Saying no would give the other person reason to think less of you.

This begs the question of whether people actually do judge you more harshly when you turn down their offer of a favor than when you accept it. To answer this question, put yourself in the place of that other person. If you held out a brownie to a coworker and the coworker said, “No thank you,” would you think the coworker was rude? Would you even remember the episode five minutes later? Chances are you would not. What if you offered that sweater or jacket to a chilly companion and she said, “No, I’m OK.” How much thought would you give to that interaction?

Impression management is at play whether we give or get. Social interactions by their very nature involve a certain degree of wanting to appear a certain way to the other person. However, unlike donations to charitable causes, you are not putting anyone out by not accepting a favor. The only negative outcome would be hurting the other person’s feelings by not appearing grateful. Therefore, the only worry you should have is that you seem ungrateful for the gesture.

You can solve this by approaching your refusal in the following ways:

1. Be gracious in your thanks, unless you need to turn off the offer (such as the hug).
2. Wait before you say no, so that it doesn’t look like an automatic rejection of the person making the offer.
3. See if there’s something else you can accept, if not the original offer.
4. Don’t take the offer but then not actually use it.
5. Indicate your willingness to take an offer of this nature—and be honest.
6. Don’t overthink it. The other person will probably move on without concern after your polite refusal, especially if you’ve worked hard to preserve the impression that you are grateful.

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Potentially uncomfortable interactions don’t have to be that way if you grease the social wheels with an appropriate amount of respect for those with whom you interact. Showing gratitude is perhaps the most effective grease there is, and a way to keep your relationships as fulfilling as possible, no matter who says “yes” or “no."

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Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne 2016.