Why People Are Flaking On You

When someone cancels last minute, or RSVPs and doesn’t show, or says they’ll come back and doesn’t, the instinct is to diagnose the person.

They’re flaky, unreliable, don’t value their commitments, but the instinct is almost always wrong.

The science is much less comfortable.

The person, or group, who got flaked on usually created the conditions for it. Not intentionally or obviously but structurally, through a series of design decisions that made flaking a predictable outcome rather than the exception.

Understanding why requires going into research that most community builders and event organizers have likely never encountered, because it sits at the intersection of behavioral economics, social psychology, and the psychology of commitment in a way that nobody has assembled specifically for the people making these decisions.

Here is what the research actually says about why people flake and what it means for how you build.

If flaking were primarily about motivation, the solution would be straightforward: find people who care more.

That assumption is wrong, and building on it produces the kind of community infrastructure that generates chronic no-show rates while the builder quietly concludes that their audience is the problem.

Peter Gollwitzer spent decades studying the gap between what people intend to do and what they actually do. A review of health behavior studies found that people followed through on their genuine intentions only 53% of the time.² Gollwitzer found that wanting to do something and actually doing it are two separate things, and one does not automatically lead to the other.¹

One explanation behavioral economists offer for why that gap exists is hyperbolic discounting⁶, the tendency to underestimate future costs because they aren't real yet. The experience of it is something everyone recognizes.

When you agree to something three Tuesdays from now, the cost of showing up is not real yet. Your calendar looks open, the event sounds good, and the version of you who will be tired on a Tuesday night after a long day does not exist in your imagination. You are making a decision about the future from the comfort of the present, and the present feels fine.

Then Tuesday arrives, and the person who said yes three weeks ago made that decision without feeling any of what today’s Tuesday actually feels like. Getting dressed, leaving the house, and being social now have a real cost, and staying home has become a real and immediate alternative in a way it wasn't before.

Behavioral economists have documented this pattern across dozens of studies and domains.⁶ People consistently underestimate future costs because those costs aren’t real yet, which makes future commitments structurally cheaper to make than to keep, every time, for almost everyone.

The second reason people flake is the one most builders find hardest to hear, because it requires an honest look at what kind of relationship actually exists between the person and the thing they committed to.

Making a commitment promotes follow-through, but only to the degree that someone feels genuinely bound to it.

Research on commitment finds that the binding feeling is what does the work, and that feeling comes from how bound someone actually feels to a commitment, not from making it.⁵ Think about the last time you canceled on a close friend versus the last time you skipped an event you had signed up for. Mark Granovetter’s research on social ties established why those two experiences feel so different.³

Strong ties carry more interpersonal weight than weak ones.

The stronger the relationship between two people, the higher the interpersonal cost of breaking a commitment to each other.

The weaker the relationship, the lower that cost, and the easier it becomes to cancel without consequence.

This is what most builders miss.

They focus on whether people will show up, and pour energy into reminders and incentives and better copy.

What they’re usually not looking at is the relationship between the person and the thing they committed to.

Most communities, especially new ones, are made almost entirely of weak ties, which means most commitments are made with very little underneath them. When the present cost becomes real, good intentions are often not enough to hold it in place.

Most builders treat flaking as a problem to solve.

The more accurate way to read it is as information.

When someone consistently shows up, the tie is strong enough to generate real obligation. When someone consistently cancels or never comes back, it isn’t. The behavior is diagnostic, and it is telling you something specific about the structure of what you built.

Most builders treat flaking as a downstream problem, something to solve with better reminder sequences, more compelling copy, or a stronger incentive to attend, but getting to a solution should start with an upstream question:

Not all events are structurally equal. Some require strong ties to produce reliable attendance.

Others sidestep the relationship requirement entirely by giving people something outside themselves to show up for. Something that exists independently of the group and that draws people in on its own terms. We call this a Third Thing, and the science behind why it works comes from Garriy Shteynberg’s research on shared attention.⁷,⁴

Research on shared attention finds that gathering people around a shared object produces genuine social bonding between strangers, without requiring them to know each other first.⁷

Proximity alone doesn’t do this.

What does it is the perception that everyone in the room is attending to the same thing simultaneously, and the effect is strongest when that thing connects to something people already believe or care about.⁴ People who co-witness having the same reaction to an idea or a piece of music, for example, report feeling closer to the people around them, even when those people were strangers walking in.⁴

The reason this works psychologically is that a Third Thing removes the social stakes from the entry point.

People feel anxious around strangers because they sense they are being evaluated.¹ When there is nothing outside the group to orient toward, that feeling lands directly on the people in the room. A shared object changes that. Attention moves outward, toward the thing, and the pressure of being sized up diffuses.⁷

This matters most when the relational infrastructure doesn’t yet exist.

A community with no Third Thing at its center, whether new or established, is built almost entirely of weak ties for anyone joining it for the first time.³ The social obligation required to hold a commitment through a competing demand isn't there yet. Asking people with weak ties to attend gatherings that require a sense of belonging to work is asking for something the relationship can’t yet deliver.

A Third Thing event asks for something smaller and more specific.

The person is showing up for the thing.

The relationship is what the event produces, not what it requires.

Over time, as those relationships strengthen, so does the obligation to show up.

Here’s the Audit:

Before designing any gathering, ask whether it requires a strong tie to attend or whether it creates the conditions for those ties to form.

If the people you’re looking to gather don’t yet have those ties and the gathering requires them, the design is working against you.

If the gathering creates the conditions for those ties to form, around a shared object of attention, you are building the relational infrastructure that everything else eventually depends on.

Flaking is not a verdict on your idea or the people you are trying to build with. It is information.

It tells you what kind of relationship exists between those people and what you built, and whether the structure of what you asked them to show up to matched the strength of that relationship.

The science on this is specific enough that the failure is predictable before it happens, which means the fix is too.

Build the thing that creates the relationship before you build the thing that requires it.

¹ Cottrell, N.B. (1972). Social facilitation. In C. McClintock (Ed.), Experimental Social Psychology. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

² Gollwitzer, P.M. & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.

³ Granovetter, M.S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.

⁴ Haj-Mohamadi, P., Fles, E.H. & Shteynberg, G. (2018). When can sharing attention increase affiliation? On the bonding effects of co-experienced belief affirmation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 75, 103–106.

⁵ Kiesler, C.A. (1971). The Psychology of Commitment: Experiments Linking Behavior to Belief. Academic Press.

⁶ Laibson, D. (1997). Golden eggs and hyperbolic discounting. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112(2), 443–477.

⁷ Sheeran, P. (2002). Intention-behavior relations: A conceptual and empirical review. European Review of Social Psychology, 12(1), 1–36.

⁸ Shteynberg, G. (2015). Shared attention. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 579–590.