Ever asked someone a question with the sole intention that they ask you the same question back? Turns out there’s a name for that: “boomerasking”. A new study has explored exactly what this often-irritating conversational habit is, as well as why people do it and the consequences that it has.
The term “boomerasking” refers to a question that acts in the same way as a boomerang – it’s designed to quickly come back to the person who threw it. According to the researchers behind the study, Alison Wood Brooks from Harvard Business School and Michael Yeomans from Imperial College London, there are three types of these so-called “boomerasks”.
First, there’s “ask-bragging” – that’s when someone asks a question and then discloses something positive. An example of this might be when someone asks you what you got for Christmas, only to respond to your answer with a laundry list of all the expensive gifts they received.
The second type is “ask-complaining”, when someone asks a question following by talking about something negative – like asking how someone else’s vacation was only to moan how yours got rained out, everyone got sick, and your ruined your new sneakers.
Finally, there’s “ask-sharing”. This one is a question followed by a neutral disclosure – the study authors give the example of someone wanting to share the weird dream they had – but is still very much done with the intention of the question-asker answering themselves.
Annoying, right? So why exactly do people do this? To find out, Brooks and Yeomans cut straight to the chase and asked the boomeraskers themselves, as part of a survey completed by 155 participants.
“Individuals believe that boomerasking offers several advantages over overt disclosure,” the researchers write of their results. For example, they found that some of the participants believed that “prefacing a disclosure with a question will make their partner(s) feel more included in the conversation.”
Others felt that if they just outrightly spoke about what they wanted to, it would violate conversational norms. “Prompting another’s opinion seems more appropriate than just spouting whatever comes to mind,” said one participant.
Despite best intentions, Brooks and Yeomans found that boomerasking usually leaves something of a sour taste in the mouth of the person on the receiving end.
“Though boomeraskers believe they leave positive impressions, in practice, their decision to share their own answer – rather than follow up on their partner’s – appears egocentric and disinterested in their partner’s perspective. As a result, people perceive boomeraskers as insincere and prefer conversation partners who straightforwardly self-disclose,” the authors write. Ouch.
Luckily, there might just be a boomerasking “antidote”. Brooks and Yeomans believe that simply being aware of what boomerasking is and its negative consequences may help, as well as trying to be a more responsive conversational partner – that means actively engaging with what someone is saying through things like affirmation and validation.
For the so-called “chronic” boomeraskers, it’s suggested that they could try to ask questions that they can’t answer themselves; that way, they can learn how to be more responsive in a conversation.
However, Brooks and Yeomans also believe there’s no reason for people to stop talking about themselves entirely.
“At some point, self-disclosure following your own question becomes not only tolerable but important for mutual involvement and balance in the conversation or the relationship more broadly,” the authors conclude.
“Future work could identify how long interlocutors should wait to self-disclose after asking a question – to help individuals strike a productive balance between being both interested in their partners and interesting themselves.”
The study is published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
