Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, who instilled in me the importance of politeness and the authority of adults. These principles turned me into the kind of child that teachers loved – and that my peers mocked.
I raised my hand to answer every question and volunteered to hand out books at every opportunity.
It could’ve been that I was innocently trying to be a good student, but I’m sure I also thought that being in my teachers’ good books might give me some kind of academic advantage.
I was people pleasing.
As I grew up, I found new people to please. Lecturers, recruiters, strangers on the internet.
I hid behind the excuse that I was saying ‘yes’ to things I really wanted to say ‘no’ to, because it would further my career. And by doing so, I was really saying ‘no’ to things that could’ve offered me a happier life, like spending time with family.
But I reasoned, that as someone at the start of what I hoped would be a long, successful career, what was wrong with a little personal sacrifice?
“There are many reasons why we do nice things for other people,” says Prof Toru Sato, a psychologist at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, in the US.
Sato began studying people pleasing in the early 2000s, concerned with its link to depression and anxiety.
One reason people pleasers make sacrifices is in the hopes of receiving something later down the line.
“We do that all the time, right?” says Sato. “We do it at work and in relationships with people: ‘I scratch your back, you scratch mine’.”
If everyone in the transaction feels happy with what they give and what they receive, the process is relatively neutral (and not harmful).
For example, a people pleaser at work who puts in extra hours in the hopes of receiving a promotion may be happy to do so, provided their organisation rewards them.
Another reason is genuine care for a person. “If your child is sick and you’re doing what you can to help them heal, you’re not doing it because you expect some kind of reward. You just genuinely care about their wellbeing,” says Sato.
This might be what a people pleaser believes they’re doing when they sacrifice their priorities and needs for someone else’s agenda, but according to Sato, there’s a hidden motive operating beneath these behaviours.
The reason that true people pleasers make sacrifices for other people isn’t for a reward, or out of kindness. “They’re actually trying to feel better about themselves,” Sato says.
“They feel like they’re not good enough and so, in order for them to feel valued, they think, ‘I need other people to like me, to respect me, to care about me’.”
The need for approval
Sato, along with other psychologists studying people pleasing in the early 2000s, was interested in the behaviour as part of a personality trait known as sociotropy.
This trait is used to refer to the tendency to place excessive value on relationships and has been linked to higher rates of depression.
People who have a strong sociotropic element in their personality will also seek approval from others, be over-concerned with what other people think of them and, importantly, will rely on others’ opinions to boost their self-esteem, says Sato.
Like other personality traits, sociotropy seems to exist on a spectrum. All of us will, in one way or another, care about what other people think and seek social approval.
Some psychologists have gone so far as to say that the desire for strong and stable attachments with others is a “fundamental human motivation”, and this has likely been reinforced throughout human history.
When the earliest human groups formed to share resources and shelter their members from harsh environments, keeping a place within a community was a matter of survival.
When social exile could mean a death sentence, developing strong connections and proving you could make worthy contributions to a collective was crucial.
The resulting social approval for such contributions then encouraged positive behaviours to be repeated, benefiting everyone in the group in the long run, psychologists say.
The issue, according to Sato, is that some people with high sociotropy will place almost all their self-worth in the hands of others, seeking approval because it’s the only way they know they’re valued.
“They’ll think things like, ‘I don’t feel like I’m good enough, that I’m worthy of being loved and respected and cared for if I don’t please other people or if other people don’t like me’,” he says.
Sato’s work has confirmed what others have found: sociotropic people are more vulnerable to depression and anxiety.
“The theory is that if [your attempt at people pleasing] doesn’t work out – meaning the other person didn’t respond favourably to you – then you’re vulnerable to being deeply affected, because you place so much emphasis on what other people think about you,” says Sato.
Someone with a healthy level of sociotropy might be able to handle a friend getting annoyed at them, for example, but an intensely sociotropic person would feel that their entire self-worth was under threat.
Being highly sociotropic has also been shown to make a person more submissive and exploitable. Their people pleasing puts them at risk of being taken advantage of.
Psychologists don’t yet know why some people are more sociotropic than others, but research suggests that the trait appears alongside other personality characteristics like neuroticism and agreeableness.
Gender also plays a role in this spectrum, with women tending to score higher on sociotropic personality questionnaires than men.
One study found that women with high levels of sociotropy were more likely to experience stress in their relationships.
The women could make their partners feel guilty, for example, by sacrificing friendships to prioritise their romantic relationship, or the women’s reliance on approval made their friends feel pressured to dole out praise.
These stressful encounters led the women to experience an increase in depressive symptoms, such as prolonged feelings of worthlessness or regret.
Living with high sociotropy is stressful. And though a sociotropic person will strive to satisfy everyone they have a relationship with, research suggests they’re likely to cause their close friends and family more pain than pleasure.
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The meaning of sacrifice
In 2007, Sato and a colleague interviewed 261 university students to find out how they acted towards strangers, close friends and family members.
They found that those with higher sociotropic personalities would be welcoming and friendly when they were in the presence of strangers, but could then be controlling, calculating and even vindictive to the people they were closest to.
This sounds counterintuitive to the nature of people pleasing, but Sato believes that as sociotropic people want to be liked by everyone, they’ll put a lot more effort into establishing a good relationship than keeping one.
When sociotropic people are already close to someone, they may feel “that a high level of relatedness can be maintained even without warmth and nurturance,” Sato wrote in his paper.
He’s also theorised that a highly sociotropic person might believe that once they’ve reached a certain quality of relationship, the only way to maintain it might be to carefully manage and control every interaction.
While the sociotropic personality trait describes the people pleaser who will go to great lengths to receive approval from everyone, there are also those who seem to take on the responsibility of pleasing a select group of others, such as parents or a spouse.
Dr Mariko Visserman, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex in the UK, has spent her career studying self-sacrifices within close relationships, typically between romantic partners.
She says that it’s in these relationships where there tends to be the most tension between what two people want, and where making sacrifices can have a big impact on the way people feel about themselves and each other.
Visserman’s work has looked at a wide range of sacrifices that people can make for the ones they love.
This ranges from the seemingly small – like a person agreeing to have sushi for dinner when they really want pizza – to big life factors, like moving to a new city to benefit a partner’s career, or whether to have children together.
Her research suggests it’s not the size of the sacrifice that matters, but the reason why it was made.
“If the decision is really about trying to benefit a partner because you care about them, then that’s a very positive motivation for making a sacrifice,” says Visserman.
This is what’s known in psychology as an approach motivation, because it involves trying to approach, or bring about, a positive goal with a sacrifice.
The opposite of this is an avoidance motivation, in which you might be people pleasing because you’re trying to avoid a conflict.
“This is where you might sacrifice for them because you want to avoid getting into some sort of tension or argument, or you want to avoid them being upset… or to avoid feeling like you’re not a good partner,” says Visserman.
“If you see people pleasing as avoiding upsetting a person, then that would be more like an avoidance motive and that wouldn’t be very helpful.”
In fact, Visserman says that her research consistently shows that when a person’s decision to sacrifice is motivated by a positive outcome, the result is beneficial for the relationship and for both parties in it.
These sacrifices can actually be good for the couple. “But if you make sacrifices and do things in your relationship to avoid negative outcomes or conflict, then that’s actually related to the negative outcomes that you’re trying to prevent,” she says.
Whether either later on or further down the line, these kinds of sacrifices lead to conflict and less happiness between partners.
With either motivation, however, over time, excessive sacrifice can harm both parties. “If your partner is making a lot of sacrifices for you, that’s not necessarily a good thing,” says Visserman. “Research has shown that people have mixed feelings when a sacrifice is made for them.
"They can feel grateful and hopefully they express that – which is good for the person making the sacrifice – but then, at the same time, [they can] also feel indebted.
"They might feel pressure to repay that sacrifice, or they might feel guilty that they didn’t [make a] sacrifice.”
As with sociotropic behaviours, people pleasing might not actually result in anyone feeling pleased. Instead, it can feel like a burden for the person on the receiving end of these sacrifices, Visserman explains.
Your sense of self-worth
People pleasing, then, is not just about what one person does (or doesn’t) do for another. It’s also dependent on the behaviour of the person the sacrifice is being made for.
“We’ve done experiments presenting participants with a scenario of the exact same sacrifice and then manipulating how their partner responds.
“If it feels like their partner doesn’t really understand what is important to them, or doesn’t really care about it, then they would really regret the sacrifice and feel like it’s a waste,” says Visserman.
But, when we do feel like a partner is grateful, when they acknowledge what they sacrificed, the whole experience is much more positive. If a sacrifice seems to be appreciated and valued, it might not feel like people pleasing at all.
Both Sato and Visserman say that to reduce people-pleasing behaviour, you first have to understand why you feel the urge to please others.
If you believe your value or worth in life is based on the strength of your relationships, this is what psychologists call a ‘contingent self-worth’. This means your self-worth is unstable: as soon as one of your relationships is threatened, it shakes your whole sense of self.
Our self-worth usually comes from several sources, however. One commonly used scale to measure self-worth identifies seven domains: approval from others, physical appearance, competition with others, academic achievement, familial love and support, alignment with personal values and morals, and spirituality or religion.
We don’t need to feel value in all seven domains, it should be noted. Instead, most research points to an unhealthy self-worth being one based on purely external sources (like the approval of others), while a relatively healthy self-worth is based on internal sources.
So, if you want to boost your self-worth, you might consider how you can turn external sources of value into internal ones. For example, the thought that ‘I am only a good person if other people like me’ could become ‘I feel good when I do things for the people I love’.
With the latter outlook, any sacrifices we make will be to approach a positive outcome, rather than to avoid a negative one.
And all of us will need to make sacrifices throughout life, as Visserman’s research has shown. We’ll also have people make sacrifices for us, sometimes without us even realising.
What matters, then, is not that we should always say ‘no’ when the opportunity to people please arises. Instead, we need to feel secure in our ability to decide what’s best for us and our relationships at that juncture.
If we then decide to please another person, we’ll likely end up pleased ourselves.
How to limit your people pleasing behaviour
1. Find your value internally, rather than in others' opinions
Explore where your sense of self-worth comes from. Research suggests we benefit from finding value internally, through identifying goals and values to live by, rather than seeking external approval or achievement.
Maybe you pride yourself on how patient you can be with others, or value your pursuit of knowledge.
2. Practise better awareness of your thoughts
Becoming more mindful of your thoughts will help in several ways.
According to Prof Toru Sato, a psychologist at Shippensburg University, mindfulness can help stop people pleasers from automatically saying ‘yes’ when they really want to say ‘no’, by allowing their real feelings to surface and balance the need to please.
This awareness can also help boost your self-worth: once you’ve identified things that make you feel good about yourself, you can try daily self-affirmations.
This involves internally highlighting any acts that align with these values.
3. Break the habit of saying 'yes'
It can be difficult to stop yourself from people pleasing if it’s become habitual. Instead, we can use lessons from the psychology of decision-making to break a habit and replace it with a new one.
First, identify the trigger of the habit. Is it an environment, like in the workplace? Or is the trigger a particular person? Then, plan in detail how you want to respond to that trigger.
The more specific, the better – come up with a list of phrases that you can use to politely but firmly turn people down.
4. Be open to conversation
As Dr Mariko Visserman, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex, explains, our perception of sacrifice depends on how the recipient reacts.
If you feel that the most painful part of your people pleasing is a lack of appreciation, you could invite your partner or friend to discuss how future conflicts might be settled in a way that makes both perspectives feel valued.
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