🔬 Science 16h ago · Science Blog Editorial Team

Across studies with more than 14,000 strangers, people underestimated how often a direct request would get a yes by about half, and the same blind spot showed up when the request was to commit a small act of vandalism

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People are bad at predicting whether a direct request will work, and they are wrong in a consistent direction. Across a research program summarized by Vanessa Bohns of Cornell University in a 2016 review in Current Directions in Psychological Science, participants who approached more than 14,000 strangers underestimated how many would say yes by around 48 percent.
This is not a single result. It is a set of related findings accumulated over roughly a decade, with the same asymmetry appearing acr

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