When One Word Steers Your Answer

In 1974, a psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus showed a group of people a film of a car accident. Afterward, she asked half the group one question: how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? The other half got the same question with a single word swapped: smashed instead of hit.

The smashed group estimated higher speeds. Same film. Same crash. One word.

 

A week later, everyone came back and answered a new question: Did you see broken glass? There was no broken glass in the film. The smashed group remembered it anyway.

One word inside one question changed what people reported seeing. Then it reached back and rewrote what they remembered.

Somebody did this to you this week. A question steered your answer, and you never noticed.

Last week, I showed you that your brain cannot refuse a question. You hear one, you start answering, whether you agreed to or not. This week is the other side of that power. If every question forces an answer, then how the question is built decides which answer you get back. Questions have an anatomy. Almost nobody looks at it.

Before we're done, a motorcycle taxi in Bangkok is going to show you what a question built right can find.  Let's get into it. =====

Every question you ask carries three things, whether you put them there on purpose or not.

1. It carries assumptions, the things it treats as already settled. Ask "Why did the launch fail?" and you've ruled the launch a failure before anyone speaks.

 

1. It carries scope, the range of answers it permits. "Coffee or tea?" permits exactly two answers. "What should we drink?" opens the room.

 

1. And it carries a load, the specific words that steer the answer. That's what "smashed" did. Nobody in that study felt steered. The steering is invisible to the person answering, and most of the time to the person asking too.

 

Once you see the parts, you can take any question apart. Take "why did the launch fail?" one more time: it assumes failure before anyone answers, its scope is only explanations, and "fail" is the loaded word doing the steering. Hold on to that one; we'll rebuild it later.

Let's start with the ones built to do damage.

The worst question in business

"That presentation was fantastic, wasn't it?"

That's a tag question: a statement dressed up as a question, built so every answer is closed off except agreement. The person asking isn't really asking, not in any way that risks hearing something different. They're collecting a signature. When lawyers use them in court, it's called leading the witness. When managers use them in conference rooms, it's called alignment.

Tag questions did damage for years at HP, in the design reviews, every product went through before customer briefings. One review was for a prototype, one of our first laptops in what's now called the "thin and light" category. The product team wanted to lead that category without straying too far from what already sold.

That's the tradeoff tag questions live in. Nobody wants to sound negative about it. So the pushback arrived dressed as agreement: "We'll still have four USB ports, right?"

You don't get thin and light with a case full of legacy ports, and the designer knew it. I watched the exasperation cross his face. Before it became a battle, I stepped in and rebuilt the question: "What's the right mix of ports for this segment, and why?" Then: "Have we tested that mix with the target customers?"

The answ