there's a talk on persuasion - I believe Chris Voss is the presenter - where one of the techniques is to phrase your question so that the answer you want is 'no'. E.g. rather than say 'would you like to go to the movies' you'd say 'is there anything you'd rather do than go to the movies'. It's interesting that this works - he said that saying 'no' is a defensive mechanism that enforces boundaries, maybe more so with some people than others. Then again, his background was hostage negotiation so he probably trained on a skewed sample.
Voss' stuff would usually be pretty shitty to use on people you're friendly with (and I found a lot of the anecdotes in his book... strained credulity, let's say, to be polite) but in this case might actually be great for breaking those "nobody can decide what to do" sorts of situations. Make people actively choose what they'd rather do than what you suggested. Could work.
