DATE: April 10, 2025 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG
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TITLE: You’re more welcome than you think: The psychology of self-inviting to social plans
URL: https://www.psypost.org/youre-more-welcome-than-you-think-the-psychology-of-self-inviting-to-social-plans/
A recent study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin sheds light on a common but often misunderstood social scenario: the hesitation many people feel when considering whether to ask to join the plans of others. Across eight studies, researchers found that people frequently underestimate how welcome their self-invitations would be. As a result, they miss out on social opportunities that the original planners would have happily included them in.
The research was inspired by a simple question: Why do people hesitate to ask if they can tag along when friends mention plans? For example, when someone casually brings up going to a festival or a movie, their friend may want to join but hold back, unsure whether they’d be seen as intrusive. Lead author Julian Givi, an associate professor at West Virginia University’s John Chambers College of Business and Economics, became interested in the topic after working on a related study about how people feel when their invitations are declined. That earlier project sparked curiosity about the flip side—what happens when someone wants to join plans but hesitates to ask.
The idea of self-inviting—when someone asks to join plans rather than being directly invited—is widely understood in everyday life, but it had received little scientific attention. Givi and his colleagues set out to explore whether people are as likely to ask to join others as those with the plans would actually want. They also wanted to understand the thought processes that drive both groups’ behavior.
To explore this, the researchers conducted eight separate studies involving thousands of participants. These included both real-life recollection studies and hypothetical scenario-based experiments. In the first study, 340 participants recalled situations from the past five years where they either self-invited or were asked by someone else to join a social activity. These events ranged from casual outings to everyday plans like going to a park or attending a museum. Participants described how they felt during the interaction, and researchers used text analysis software to measure the emotional tone of their responses.
Later studies used structured scenarios to isolate specific psychological factors. Participants were randomly assigned roles as either “potential self-inviters” (those considering asking to join plans) or “plan-holders” (those already making plans). They were asked to imagine situations where a mutual friend had plans and to report either how likely they would be to ask to join or how they would feel if someone else asked to join them. The researchers measured both behavioral intentions and emotional responses, such as how irritated or annoyed the participants believed others would be by a self-invitation.
The findings were consistent across studies. In nearly every case, people imagining themselves as potential self-inviters were less likely to ask to join than plan-holders said they would prefer. For instance, in one study, only 59% of self-inviters said they would ask to join plans, while 92% of plan-holders said they would have liked to be asked. This pattern held even when the plan-holders had previously invited the self-inviter in the past or when logistical issues were minimized.
“The effect sizes were quite large,” Givi told PsyPost. “In other words, self-inviters and plan-holders really disagreed.”
Why do people hold back from asking to join? The research pointed to two major factors. First, potential self-inviters overestimated how annoyed plan-holders would be by the request. Second, they wrongly believed that the plan-holders had likely thought about inviting them and then decided not to, which felt like a form of social rejection. In reality, the people making plans often hadn’t thought about inviting others at all. Their decisions were based more on logistics or timing than on exclusion.
This mistaken belief—the idea that others intentionally left them out—fed into people’s reluctance to self-invite. The researchers connected this to broader psychological tendencies, such as egocentrism and sensitivity to rejection. People often overestimate how much others think about them, which can lead them to imagine slights that weren’t intended. That kind of misperception makes a simple ask feel emotionally risky, even when it’s not.
Additional experiments confirmed that this sequence of thoughts—believing one was deliberately excluded and expecting irritation from others—was a key reason people chose not to self-invite. In fact, mediation analyses showed that these beliefs helped explain why self-inviters acted more cautiously than plan-holders would have liked.
Interestingly, the mismatch disappeared in situations where the self-inviter had already received a previous invitation but had initially declined. In these cases, both parties had shared knowledge that an invitation had been considered and extended. Without the uncertainty of being “deliberately” left out, self-inviters were more likely to ask again to join if their plans changed.
“We demonstrate that potential self-inviters fail to ask to join the plans of others as often as plan-holders would prefer, because potential self-inviters overestimate how irritated plan-holders would be by such self-invitations,” Givi explained. “Further, we show that these asymmetries are rooted in differing viewpoints about the mindsets of plan-holders when they originally made the plans. Namely, potential self-inviters exaggerate the likelihood that plan-holders had already considered inviting them but decided against it (vs. made plans without considering inviting them).”
“The make takeaway is that we as a general public should give more consideration to the prospect of asking to join the plans of others. Of course, we shouldn’t self-invite in any context, but in many, it does not hurt to ask.”
However, Givi also cautioned that “you wouldn’t want to self-invite to anything that involves a formal invitation (e.g., a wedding). In these cases, the people with the plans have already given lots of consideration to who they want to invite—and who they didn’t want to invite.”
As with all research, there are a few limitations to consider. Many of the studies relied on hypothetical scenarios or recollections of past events, which can be affected by memory biases. Though the researchers attempted to account for this with varied methodologies, future work could benefit from real-time observation or diary studies tracking social behavior as it happens. Also, while their scenarios focused on casual, everyday plans between friends, it’s possible that the findings would differ for more formal events or in relationships with less emotional closeness.
Further research could also explore cultural and personality influences on self-inviting. Do some cultures normalize asking to join plans more than others? Are extroverted people less concerned about being seen as intrusive? And how do self-inviters handle being turned down? These are questions the authors suggest for future study.
“The invitation psychology research area is brand new,” Givi said. “I want to keep exploring all aspects of it.”
The study, “Self-Invitation Hesitation: How and Why People Fail to Ask to Join the Plans of Others,” was authored by Julian Givi, Daniel M. Grossman, Colleen P. Kirk, and Constantine Sedikides.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/youre-more-welcome-than-you-think-the-psychology-of-self-inviting-to-social-plans/
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