It Doesn't Hurt to Ask

K.  Huang; M.  Yeomans; A.W.  Brooks; J.  Minson; F.  Gino

Article | Journal of Personality and Social Psychology | September 2017

It Doesn't Hurt to Ask: Question-asking Increases Liking

by K. Huang, M. Yeomans, A.W. Brooks, J. Minson and F. Gino

Abstract

Conversation is a fundamental human experience, one that is necessary to pursue intrapersonal and interpersonal goals across myriad contexts, relationships, and modes of communication. In the current research, we isolate the role of an understudied conversational behavior: question-asking. Across three studies of live dyadic conversations, we identify a robust and consistent relationship between question-asking and liking: people who ask more questions are better liked by their conversation partners. When people are instructed to ask more questions, they are perceived as higher in responsiveness, an interpersonal construct that captures listening, understanding, validation, and care. We measure responsiveness with an attitudinal measure from previous research as well as a novel behavioral measure: the number of follow-up questions one asks. In both cases, responsiveness explains the effect of question-asking on liking. In addition to analyzing live get-to-know-you conversations online, we also studied face-to-face speed-dating conversations. We find that speed daters who ask more questions during their dates are more likely to elicit agreement for second dates from their partners, a behavioral indicator of liking. We trained a natural language processing algorithm as a “follow-up question detector” that we applied to our speed-dating data (and can be applied to any text data to more deeply understand question-asking dynamics). The follow-up question rate established by the algorithm explained why question-asking led to speed-dating success. We also find that, despite the persistent and beneficial effects of asking questions, people do not anticipate that question-asking increases interpersonal liking.

Keywords: question-asking; liking; responsiveness; Conversation; natural language processing; Interpersonal Communication;

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Citation:

Huang, K., M. Yeomans, A.W. Brooks, J. Minson, and F. Gino. "It Doesn't Hurt to Ask: Question-asking Increases Liking." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 3 (September 2017): 430–452.

Much of an executive’s workday is spent asking others for information—requesting status updates from a team leader, for example, or questioning a counterpart in a tense negotiation. Yet unlike professionals such as litigators, journalists, and doctors, who are taught how to ask questions as an essential part of their training, few executives think of questioning as a skill that can be honed—or consider how their own answers to questions could make conversations more productive.
That’s a missed opportunity. Questioning is a powerful tool for unlocking value in companies: It spurs learning and the exchange of ideas, it fuels innovation and better performance, and it builds trust among team members. And it can mitigate business risk by uncovering unforeseen pitfalls and hazards.
Several techniques can enhance the power and efficacy of queries: Favor follow-up questions, know when to keep questions open ended, get the sequence right, use the right tone, and pay attention to group dynamics.

Article | Academy of Management Journal | April 2018

Compromised Ethics in Hiring Processes? How Referrers' Power Affects Employees' Reactions to Referral Practices

Rellie Derfler-Rozin, Bradford Baker and F. Gino

In this paper, we explore referral-based hiring practices and show how a referrer’s power (relative to the hiring manager) influences other organizational members’ support (or lack thereof) for who is hired through perceptions of the hiring manager’s motives and morality. We apply principles derived from the literature on attribution of motives to research on relational power to delineate a model that explains employees’ moral evaluations of and reactions to referral practices based on the power relationship between a referrer and a hiring manager. Specifically, we predict that employees are more likely to see the acceptance of a referral from a higher- (as opposed to a lower-) power referrer as a way for the hiring manager to gain more power in the relationship with the referrer, thereby attributing more self-interested motives and more counter-organizational motives to the hiring manager in such situations. These motives are then associated with harsher moral judgments of the hiring manager, which in turn lead to less support for the hiring decision. We find support for our model in two experimental studies and two field studies. We discuss implications for the literature on referral practices, ethics, and observers’ reactions to power dynamics.

Keywords: Selection and Staffing; Ethics; Perception;

Citation:

Derfler-Rozin, Rellie, Bradford Baker, and F. Gino. "Compromised Ethics in Hiring Processes? How Referrers' Power Affects Employees' Reactions to Referral Practices." Academy of Management Journal 61, no. 2 (April 2018): 615–636. View Details

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Does It Hurt To Ask? (DIHTA) is an interactive exercise that pairs students (in groups of two) for a brief, spontaneous, open-ended conversation during class. Each student is given instructions to ask many questions (as many as possible) or few questions (ideally zero) during their conversation (resulting in some high-high questioning pairs, some low-low questioning pairs, and some high-low questioning pairs). The exercise is flexible—it can stand on its own for a whole class session (taking 60-90 minutes), or it can be used to supplement other material within the same class session (taking as little as 30 minutes total). This teaching note provides step-by-step instructions to administer the exercise in class. The goals of the exercise are to examine how asking questions during conversation influences interpersonal perception, information exchange, decision making, productivity, as well as relationships and happiness over time—to weigh the pros and cons of asking questions versus making statements in conversation. While there are many reasons people don’t ask questions (such as egocentrism, anxiety, apathy, and ignorance), those who can become talented question askers stand to learn more information, to be better liked, and to have more influence than those who do not.

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It Doesn't Hurt to Ask: Question-asking Increases Liking

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