And that means our force is less. So as we go down a group, our ionization energy tends to decrease. So to wrap up, basically, the higher your ionization energy is, the less likely you are to give up electrons. And we'll see that this directly translates into something called electronegativity. So let's look at the third periodic trend called electronegativity. Now, electronegativity is simply the ability of atoms to accept or attract other electrons.