Sushi or pizza? Either’s fine. Park or museum? Either’s fine. Matinee or the late show? Seriously, whatever everyone else wants.
From the outside, this person looks wonderfully easygoing. Low maintenance, no drama, happy to go along with whatever the group decides. And sometimes that’s all it is.
But when someone rarely states a preference, when either’s fine is the answer to everything from dinner plans to vacation destinations to what they want for their birthday, psychology offers another possibility.
Which is that choosing may be connected to a much bigger risk than simply picking the wrong restaurant.
Nobody sat them down and said preferences are dangerous, but they figured it out
It usually starts small.
A kid picks a restaurant and dinner is disappointing, and someone at the table makes a comment.
A teenager suggests a movie and her friends hate it, and she hears about it for a week.
A child grows up in a house where having an opinion meant defending it, and defending it meant risking someone’s mood.
These moments, singled out, aren’t traumatic. But they add up to a lesson: stating what you want means becoming responsible for what happens next. And if what happens next is bad, you’re the person who caused it.
The pattern doesn’t require a difficult childhood.
It can come from a family where choices got second-guessed, from friendships where the person who suggested the plan absorbed the blame when it didn’t work, from being teased for caring too much about something that didn’t go well.
The routes are different. The destination is the same: keeping everyone comfortable becomes easier than wanting something.
Psychologist Dana Jack at Western Washington University studied this pattern and called it self-silencing: the tendency to suppress your own thoughts, feelings, and preferences in order to preserve harmony or avoid conflict.
Her research, which has been built on for more than three decades, found that people who chronically silence themselves don’t just miss out on getting what they want. They show higher rates of depression, lower self-worth, and in some cases, worse physical health.
And a UC Berkeley study led by Briana Carrillo, involving more than 1,600 people, found something counterintuitive about this pattern: people who silenced themselves to avoid tension in their relationships ended up experiencing more conflict, not less. The inauthenticity ruined the connection they were trying to protect.
Self-silencing isn’t the same as compromise.
Compromise is choosing to give ground because the relationship matters more than the issue. Self-silencing is not knowing you had ground to give, because the habit of erasing the preference kicked in before the preference fully formed.
Choosing means owning whatever happens next, and “either’s fine” means nobody can blame them
Once the association is in place, the logic is clean.
If you pick the restaurant and dinner is terrible, everyone at the table knows whose idea it was. If someone else picks it and the food is bad, you’re just along for the ride. Same bad dinner, completely different position.
Mary Steffel at Northeastern University and Elanor Williams at Indiana University found that people sometimes hand choices to someone else specifically because delegation reduces the feeling that they’ll be responsible if things go badly. It’s a strategy for avoiding blame, not laziness or indifference.
What makes delegation feel like relief instead of loss is how neatly it solves the blame problem.
The preference is still in there. The person might want sushi. But saying so means that if the fish is bad, or the wait is long, or someone at the table doesn’t love it, the evening now has their fingerprints on it.
Saying either’s fine wipes those fingerprints clean. Someone else picks, someone else owns the outcome, and the person who deferred gets to have the experience without carrying the responsibility for it.
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The preference is in there, but it arrives after the moment has passed
After enough repetition, the pattern stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like who they are. I’m just easygoing. I don’t care about that stuff. I’m not picky.
But something specific happens in the moment before they answer. They scan. Not the menu, not the options: the room. They read the group’s energy, check who seems to have an opinion, calculate which answer will create the least friction.
By the time that scan is done, their own preference has been filed away somewhere they can’t reach, and either’s fine comes out as if it were the truth.
The giveaway, if they’re paying attention to it themselves, is what happens after. They say I don’t care about where to eat, and then twenty minutes into the meal they realize they did care, and they wanted the other place.
They say whatever you want about the movie, and then spend two hours wishing they’d said something.
What’s happening isn’t an absence of preference. It’s a delay. The self-silencing response fires faster than the preference can surface, so by the time they know what they wanted, the decision is already made, and it feels too late to say anything.
Research on people-pleasing and self-suppression shows this is a documented pattern, not a personality flaw.
Psychologist Emily Impett at the University of Toronto Mississauga found that suppressing your own preferences in relationships doesn’t just affect you: the people around the person who self-silences experience lower well-being too. That falseness registers, even when nobody can name it.
The person who always says either’s fine often ends up being harder to connect with, not easier.
People around them stop asking. The relationship loses a dimension. And the person themselves starts to feel a little invisible, without being able to point to the moment it happened.
Sometimes “either’s fine” just means both sound good
Not every flexible person is hiding something. Some people do like sushi and pizza equally. Some people care far less about the movie time than everyone else at the table, and their whatever you want is exactly what it sounds like.
The research on decision avoidance is also mixed.
A 2023 meta-analysis looking at whether handing off decisions reliably reduces regret found that only one strategy, sticking with the status quo, clearly worked. For other forms of avoidance, including delegation, the evidence was less consistent.
But the pattern becomes worth paying attention to when either’s fine is the answer to everything, not just the things that don’t matter.
When it’s the answer to coffee or tea, aisle or middle seat, 6:00 or 7:00. And especially when the person seems anxious or uncomfortable the moment someone turns the question back on them and says, No, but what do you want?
A bad restaurant choice doesn’t make someone a bad person
Maybe either really is fine tonight. Maybe both sound good, and the decision doesn’t matter enough to fight for.
But if someone has spent years making sure their preferences can’t disappoint anybody, being asked what do you want? can feel much bigger than choosing between two restaurants.
The question isn’t about dinner. It’s about whether it’s safe to want something when the answer might not work out for everyone.
The person who starts answering that question isn’t becoming difficult.
They’re learning that a bad pick isn’t a character flaw. That someone being mildly disappointed by the restaurant doesn’t mean the preference was a mistake. That having a want, and saying it out loud, doesn’t make them the person who ruined the evening.
It can start with something as small as coffee or tea. The 6:00 or the 7:00 movie. If they just pick one and say it, they would see that, most of the time, what happens is nothing. And nothing is the whole point.
