People know who to ask for favors despite underestimating compliance.

People in directed dyadic favor-asking judgments accurately identify who will comply, despite a mean-level tendency to underestimate compliance, across 13,196 ratings in four studies.

• Why it matters: Prior work on interpersonal accuracy relied on mean-level bias, potentially hiding dyadic judgment and overgeneralizing that people misread others’ responses.
• What they did: Across four studies totaling 13,196 directed dyadic ratings, participants made favor requests and provided anticipated compliance judgments, enabling dyadic meta-accuracy tests for specific and general requests.
• The result: People’s dyadic accuracy differentiates likely compliers from noncompliers among well- and newly-acquainted individuals, beyond self-projection, refining how favor-asking should be understood.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.