The Artful Dodger: Answering the Wrong Question the Right Way

Todd  Rogers; Michael I. Norton

Article | Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

The Artful Dodger: Answering the Wrong Question the Right Way

Abstract

What happens when speakers try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? In 4 studies, we show that listeners can fail to detect dodges when speakers answer similar-but objectively incorrect-questions (the "artful dodge"), a detection failure that goes hand in hand with a failure to rate dodgers more negatively. We propose that dodges go undetected because listeners' attention is not usually directed toward a goal of dodge detection (i.e., Is this person answering the question?) but rather toward a goal of social evaluation (i.e., Do I like this person?). Listeners were not blind to all dodge attempts, however. Dodge detection increased when listeners' attention was diverted from social goals toward determining the relevance of the speaker's answers (Study 1), when speakers answered a question egregiously dissimilar to the one asked (Study 2), and when listeners' attention was directed to the question asked by keeping it visible during speakers' answers (Study 4). We also examined the interpersonal consequences of dodge attempts: When listeners were guided to detect dodges, they rated speakers more negatively (Study 2), and listeners rated speakers who answered a similar question in a fluent manner more positively than speakers who answered the actual question but disfluently (Study 3). These results add to the literatures on both Gricean conversational norms and goal-directed attention. We discuss the practical implications of our findings in the contexts of interpersonal communication and public debates.

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Goals and Objectives; Performance Evaluation; Social Issues;

Format: Print

9 pages

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Citation:

Rogers, Todd, and Michael I. Norton. "The Artful Dodger: Answering the Wrong Question the Right Way." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 17, no. 2 (June 2011): 139–147.

Article | Journal of Consumer Psychology

The Feeling of Not Knowing It All

Haiyang Yang, Ziv Carmon, Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton

How do consumers assess their mastery of knowledge they have learned? We explore this question by investigating a common knowledge consumption situation: encountering opportunities for further learning. We argue and show that such opportunities can trigger a feeling-of-not-knowing-it-all (FONKIA), which lowers consumers’ confidence in their mastery of the knowledge they already possess. Specifically, listing optional follow-up readings at the conclusion of a course lowered students’ confidence in their mastery of the course material they had already learned (Study 1). Encountering an optional learning opportunity increased the FONKIA, which mediated the decreased confidence (Studies 2 and 3). We also document two moderators consistent with our conceptualization. First, participants primed with mastery (vs. instrumental) motivation were more negatively impacted when they encountered optional learning opportunities. Second, the more related the optional opportunities were to the target topic, the lower participants’ confidence in their mastery of what they had already learned. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings, such as encouraging further learning or harming teaching evaluations.

Keywords: Knowledge consumption; Consumption of learning; Judgment of knowledge; Feeling ofknowing; Confidence in knowledge; WYSIATI; FONKIA; Knowledge Acquisition; Learning; Perception;

Citation:

Yang, Haiyang, Ziv Carmon, Dan Ariely, and Michael I. Norton. "The Feeling of Not Knowing It All." Journal of Consumer Psychology 29, no. 3 (July 2019): 455–462. View Details

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The Artful Dodger: Answering the Wrong Question the Right Way

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