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Questions can be a great way to collect information to shape the nature of a conversation or to impact how other people perceive us. But we can also use questions in a defensive way. Sometimes people ask us sort of questions that are unfair. You might be in a job interview, for example, and someone might say, “What was your salary at the last job?” Someone might say, “Are you planning on taking any leave in the next year?” Questions that make us feel a little bit uncomfortable are a bit inappropriate and put us in a difficult situation because what we want to do is say, “I don’t feel comfortable answering that question,” but if we say that and we’re worried that it’ll lead us to be perceived more negatively. At the same point, if we answer that, if we give the people the information they’re asking for, we’re putting ourselves at a detriment, right? If we’re in a job interview and they ask us what our salary was at the last job, and we give them that information, now they can use it against us.
Can we use questions to help us get out of those situations? And it turns out that we can. So some researchers a couple years ago at Wharton did some really neat work about what they call deflection questions, using questions to deflect other people’s questions and shape the nature of conversation. If someone asked us something like, “Hey, what was your salary at your last job?” saying something like, “Oh yeah, I was hoping we could talk about that. What are usually some of the expectations of salary at this job?” Or saying something like, if someone asks you, “Are you planning on taking leave in the near term,” saying, “Oh, I wanted to learn more about your leave policy. I wasn’t aware of it. Could you share a little bit more about what that policy is?” What those questions do is they almost act like a mirror. They take a question in and they push them out in a different direction.
Now, sure, the person who asks you the inappropriate question can say, “Well, hold on. I don’t want to talk about the salary at this job. I want to talk about the salary at your last job.” But that kind of makes them a bit of a not nice person, right? Now they’re the one that’s stopping that merry-go-round and turning the music off. And so they’re less likely to do it, not just for that reason, because the easiest thing is also to answer your question rather than go back to the thing they said previously. So by using questions as a mirror, by deflecting incoming things and shaping the direction of conversation, we can move things to avoid the areas we want to avoid and push things in a more positive direction.