Who gets the hint? Culture variation in refusal in Poland and Portugal

Refusing people is hard. People often soften their romantic refusals to protect feelings, avoid conflict, and preserve dignity. Previous studies have found that people express refusal differently across cultures, but few studies have looked at to how people recognize refusal boundaries across cultures. This study examines how people recognize, express, and imagine refusal boundaries across in Poland and Portugal. Poland and Portugal are interesting test cases because they differ in a historical factor that might influence how people communicate—farming (Poland) versus fishing (Portugal). Fishing involved more mobility and interacting with strangers than farming. That may have made it more important to communicate directly, without assuming the listener will share enough common background to understand subtle cues. In contrast, farming involved more fixed relationships, which gives people more shared background and raises the cost of offending others. To test this, I had men in both cultures read refusal messages and rated how much the messages communicated refusal, as well as their willingness to ask again. Then participants wrote their own refusal messages, which I coded for directness. People in Portugal were less willing to ask again and more likely to deem repeated pursuit as harassment after refusal cues than people in Poland. When they wrote their own refusals, men in Portugal more often expressed boundaries directly, combining apologies or explanations with a clear "no." People in Poland, wrote messages with more hedging and emotional softening, especially when the person they were rejecting had social ties to the participant. Men also rated how other men in their country would respond to these scenarios. They showed a consistent "self-country gap," where they rated themselves as more sensitive to refusal cues than other men. Although this study was limited to two cultures, the results are consistent with the idea that a history of fishing leads to more direct communication.