By Aysha ImtiazFeatures correspondent

Rejecting an invitation can lead to hurt feelings. But new research suggests choosing your excuse carefully can help smooth the process.

When Karachi-based couple Zawar and Manahyl started sending invitations for their October wedding, they were convinced they’d hit all the right notes. They created WhatsApp groups to organise oodles of pre-wedding festivities, and delivered invitations to family members by hand to honour tradition. 

Happily expecting enthusiastic responses, they were dejected and upset when excuses started rolling in from some of their intended guests. “It really became a defining moment and made us re-evaluate our relationship with people we loved... people we thought loved us back,” they shared. 

We’ve all felt that sting when someone declines our invitation. When we invite someone to a social engagement, we’re asking them to do more than just attend a gathering at a stipulated time. We’re inviting them into a meaningful part of our lives. We may even subconsciously design the event with the intended guests’ experience in mind, and equate acceptance with values like closeness or friendship. That means that even if the other person offers a credible reason for turning down our invitation, we can feel slighted.    

New research links this reaction to our perceptions of choice and control. If we believe our invitation is declined due to factors beyond the intended guests’ control, we take it less personally and chalk it up to circumstance, rather than feeling shunned because we feel they chose not to attend. Understanding differences between types of refusals is important to help us moderate our response as inviters – and might even enable us to more considerately decline invitations as invitees ourselves. 

On the receiving end 

“People hate having their invitations declined because it’s a form of social rejection from [those] they care about most,” explain US-based psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer, who have recently published a book about shared social identities.

Feeling bad due to a declined invitation may also be an evolutionary response, they explain. “Almost the entirety of our history involved living in small groups, and getting excluded... would have meant near certain death. [Our brains are] uniquely attuned to signs of inclusion and exclusion. When someone rejects us, it sends a deep and powerful signal that our status in the group might not be as secure as we had hoped. People have a visceral reaction to this type of threat.” 

Yet new research shows the type of reason invitees cite when declining an invitation plays a huge role in how the inviter perceives the response. Research published by the Journal of Consumer Psychology shows that citing financial scarcity is a better way to decline an invitation than time scarcity. In other words, declining a social invitation by saying, “I don’t have the money” is interpreted better by the inviter than the invitee saying, “I don’t have the time”.

One of the studies in the research focused specifically on 132 couples planning their weddings. The couples were asked to reflect on how they perceived invitation rejections (which were based on either time or money-related excuses) and use a seven-point scale to indicate how much they deemed the excuse to be outside the intended guest’s control as well as how trustworthy they found the excuse. 

The couples were asked how close they felt to their intended guests, both before and after receiving their reasons for rejecting their invitation. The difference was pronounced, says Grant E Donnelly, assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University, US, and one of the authors of the research: the negative impact of receiving a time-related excuse was about twice as strong as the effect of receiving a money-related excuse. “Invitations are just incredibly intimate,” he explains, “You’re making yourself vulnerable. When there’s a time-excuse rejection, the inviter infers they [the invitee/s] don't have time for me as opposed to thinking they don’t have time, period. You fill in the blanks.” 

That’s because we view money as being something we exercise a limited degree of control over, with external factors influencing how much of it we can access and non-discretionary expenses vying for limited funds. Time, though, is perceived as something everyone has equal access to – we’re all granted 24 hours a day, explains Donnelly, and we believe we have more discretionary control over how we spend it. This makes time-scarcity rejections feel like a matter of volition and not wanting to make time, versus not having funds. 

Money over time 

In a wider context, Donnelly and his co-authors also ran Twitter data analytics on 2,649 tweets (all directed to a specific person with an @ sign and communicating scarcity of either money or time). They found that Twitter users were twice as likely to ‘like’ a tweet communicating money scarcity as temporal scarcity. So, for example, “I legit don’t have money for breakfast”, is likely to garner twice as many likes as saying, “I have a paper to write and can’t leave the house”, partially because citing a lack of time so often functions as status-signalling. In other words, citing a lack of time might come across as ‘humble-bragging’, and distances the recipient of the communication.

In another study that was part of the same research, Donnelly and his co-authors organised a short ‘get-to-know-you’ conversation among participants. The participants were split into speaking and listening roles, and those assigned the talking role were further divided into two groups: one was instructed to talk about why they couldn’t give more time to charity, and the other group would explain why they couldn’t give more money. “So, listening participants either heard how someone was so busy and had no time or why they had no money,” says Donnelly. 

Then, after returning to their cubicles, listeners were asked to divvy up pictures of toilets and puppies to be ranked by the person they conversed with and themselves. Those who had heard time-related excuses directed fewer pictures of puppies to the other participant, sending more toilets their way and keeping more of the inherently pleasing pictures of puppies for themselves. This suggests that we feel more pro-social towards people with financial scarcity excuses, rather than time alone. And the fact that such a marked difference emerged in conversations less than three minutes long, and without our investment in them attending a personal event, attests to how quickly the message is internalised. 

When processing messages related to time or money, the research shows, we seem hardwired to identify with financial scarcity – not temporal constraints. And as a result, when our invitation is rejected due to money troubles, we look on it far more kindly than a rejection linked to an overly busy schedule. 

"One sure-fire way to hurt relationships is to say you don't have time. Generally, people have this lay belief that you prioritise the things you value. So, it's almost a personal insult of you not valuing them," says Donnelly. 

“People probably find rejections that blame money troubles, childcare needs or other adverse circumstances less hurtful because it makes it seem like the decision is outside of our friends' control,” add Bavel and Packer, meaning it’s “not a rejection at all, just an unfortunate turn of events”. 

‘Talk it through’ 

Armed with this knowledge, it may seem as if we have solved the problem of how to decline an invitation without causing offence. Indeed, citing a lack of funds as a reason for turning down an invitation comes with another benefit; it also protects relationships because “you’ve matched the first mover [the inviter] in vulnerability”, says Donnelly. “It’s an intimate disclosure eliciting a low-power position and fostering a closer bond; it makes the inviter feel special and in the know.”

Yet Donnelly recognises citing a lack of funds isn’t always relevant: “Saying you don't have energy works, too, because energy reserves can fluctuate and be depleted.” A working paper by Harvard Business School also indicates turning down an invitation because of Covid-19 contagion risk is also seen as well within the scope of ‘uncontrollability’. 

Whatever you choose, Donnelly recommends providing detailed evidence to solidify the trustworthiness of the excuse, mainly by stressing how it rests outside our locus of control. He concedes, though, that citing a lack of funds (or even a lack of time) may lead to increased monitoring by the inviter, as the more details are offered, the more opportunity there might be for them to scrutinise how we do spend our time, our money or both. 

Susan Schlossberg, former director of the National League of Junior Cotillions, a US-based etiquette organisation, cautions against using financial scarcity excuses too liberally and adds that even if the intended guest declines, he or she would hopefully still purchase a nice gift (it need not be expensive). To prevent hurt feelings, she recommends a heart-to-heart with the inviter, “otherwise people may take it personally and make that proverbial mountain out of a molehill”.   

For inviters like Zawar and Manahyl, acceptance has come from objectively taking stock of declined invitations – not dwelling on what they might symbolise – and attributing them to reasons beyond their guests’ control, financial or otherwise. They’re finding joy in the people who can come, and indeed, in each other, as they count down the final days to their wedding.   

At the end, the fact that it still matters so much to us when an invitation is declined may be an uplifting sign, because it shows that we care about people and our connection to them. As Donnelly says, “In some ways, it gives me some sort of belief in humanity.”

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