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The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
- sandoooo 7y agoThe author misses the point. People are avoiding sensitive questions not because it impacts opinion on average, but because of the rare outliers that ruin it for everybody. It takes just a single asshole reporting you to HR to ruin your life.
- smadge 7y agoI only read the abstract and the first few pages, so my opinion is uninformed. However my first thought was similar to yours. Asking sensitive questions may be moderately positive on average, but occasionally extremely negative.
- loopz 7y agoUntil you get to know people, it requires some tact and restraint. The negative reaction indicates the person is yet to know and respect you as peer. A few such apples are to be avoided until the time they see your light.
- georgewsinger 7y agoYep -- a classic "Expected Value is not the only thing that matters, but also one's Risk of Ruin" situation. The counter-argument is this: do we still overestimate our true risk of ruin when it comes to asking sensitive questions? Are we actually going to get fired (or whatever horrendous thing) for not asking that question? I bet the answer is that we still overrate our true probability of ruin when it comes to these things.
- naniwaduni 7y agoIt is much safer to overestimate risk than underestimate it!
- sandoooo 7y agothe true risk of any given question is a nebulous thing depending on many unknowns and your very specifc circumstances, and it varies from day to day. Working it out is a cognitive load that doesn't seem to be worth the effort. Plus you don't even get much for braving this danger, on average. From the organization's perspective, though, this is a cancerous growth that kills your employees' motivation and innovation and foments a culture of distrust, siloing and paranoia. Too bad there's no easy way to align the incentives there, since the corps are hella scared of being on the wrong side of political winds, too.
- arvinsim 7y ago> Are we actually going to get fired (or whatever horrendous thing) for not asking that question? What's worse than being fired is to be stuck on a job where the environment/culture has gone bad. Not everyone has the economic and social mobility to change jobs on the fly.
- hanniabu 7y agoOr where you're effectively in a dead end job because that incident with HR causes you to get passed up for any promotions or lateral shifts.
- malnourish 7y agoI'm not sure there's anything one could say that would unjustifiably lead to that.
- vanniv 7y agoTrue, though it seems like asking sensitive questions is a moderate risk, whereas answering them is the real high-risk activity.
- crimsonalucard 7y agoI don't think it's that simple. You pose the issue as if it's a rational decision. There is no rational decision in your brains choice to make you fear public speaking or fear heights. I think avoiding sensitive questions is largely the same thing. Many people have an irrational fear and their excuse (while semi legitimate) is to try to rationalize the whole thing as you have.
- asdf21 7y agoAnd certain "sensitive" questions are just straight up illegal to ask in an interview / the workplace, and there are tons that are in a gray area depending on context: - Do you have any medical conditions / health issues? - Do you plan on having more children? - What religion are you?
- authoritarian 7y agoNone of the examples of the "sensitive" questions I've read are anything that HR would discipline someone for (at least where I work). If the environment was so toxic that people were reporting each other for questions like these, and HR was actually acting on it, it wouldn't be a place I would want to work anyway. Either way, it certainly wouldn't "ruin your life"
- zrkrlc 7y agoHmm, in my head, I model conversation as a game of who can get the mine the most "intimacy", if you will, while revealing the least about oneself. So risque topics are, as the adjective suggests, high risk, but also high reward. Correspondingly, small talk is a lot of low risk, low reward back-and-forth. You don't have to be intimate with a stranger, but you need to stick your neck out if you want to progress beyond pleasantries. Here's a longer piece about the whole topic of conversations that I wrote a while back: https://zrkrlc.wordpress.com/2018/11/27/a-long-guide-to-conversations/ https://zrkrlc.wordpress.com/2018/11/27/a-long-guide-to-conv...
- ineedasername 7y agoTrying to get the most out of another while giving little or nothing seems like a strange and rather mercenary way to approach interpersonal interactions. Could you explain how you arrive at this mode of communication?
- zrkrlc 7y agoWell, no. My point was that conversations are not zero-sum games. You produce intimacy via information exchanges, which you both benefit from, though there will always be an information asymmetry between you and your conversation partner. I know analysing social interactions is seen as a rather, if you will forgive the term, "autistic" (or worse, sociopathic) way of looking at things , but some people do not have the natural capacity for social interactions that the vast majority of the population enjoy. I myself have wondered for years if I lay on the autism spectrum before getting diagnosed with ADHD and so all this I had to learn explicitly from years of observation.
- loopz 7y agoNothing wrong with being autistic, but it's just one of many reference points and is no more or less valid than others. Analysing too much loses connection with others.
- authoritarian 7y ago
- ronilan 7y agoWhat is a sensitive question? Not the examples provided. Here’s an alternative. Former Secretary of Defense for two presidents Donald Rumsfeld once framed (brilliantly actually) the possible things we know. ... there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know [1] A while after someone (which I can’t trace back) made an interesting (and equally brilliant) observation - there is a fourth option - unknown knowns - that is, things we don’t know we know. In most cases, that person pointed out, the category contains, things we actually know, but prefer to pretend that we don’t. So, what is a sensitive question? A sensitive question is one for which the answer is an unknown known. The cost of asking such a question in American society (and, obviously in SV) is dear. Avoiding them is free. Ask carefully. [1] https://youtu.be/REWeBzGuzCc https://youtu.be/REWeBzGuzCc
- Thorentis 7y agoI thought you were going in a different direction with this. To me, sensitive questions are very much in the first observation you pointed out (known unknowns). i.e. things we know we don't know about somebody. These things are often sensitive and therefore avoided in casual conversation. Not every known unknown is a sensitive questions, but a question by definition implies an unknowing. You ask so you can discover (unless you're perhaps asking as a conversation starter in a particular topic). I'm not sure I follow what you mean by "unknown knows". How is a sensitive question an unknown known?
- ronilan 7y agoA sensitive question is one for which the answer is an Unknown Known. Put differently, answers in that quadrant are the ones the questioned individual would like to avoid. As long as you, the asker, avoid asking them, there is a peaceful equilibrium. Once you ask such, you become a hostile. Or put in the original context - Unknowns Knowns are coverups.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
- tony 7y agoI wonder what would be a more personal (and interesting) question than: - Describe your relationship with your mother - Describe your relationship with your father Completely open-ended, yet, is universal to everyone. Being candid in that area can provide a lot of foundational underpinning to understand someone. But - would people find it awkward? Would they take offense? Feel pain thinking about the answer? As for someone's political opinion in a specific area, I'm worried self-presentation pressures and social environment crafts us to more heated (or passive, to not make a stir) for us to conform. In fact, on that subject, Wikipedia's page on this area is amazing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity The thing is - isn't the interesting thing someone's true hardships, needs, dreams, interpretations of life events, and desires, rather than something stemming from an idealized image they want to portray others, to be "good"? When social pressures of trying to say things the "right way", it's not a good read. Sure, they may be lashing out at others in outrage. Perhaps its very righteous and personal (most of the time?) But what if, paradoxically, they're doing it out of pressure to be apart of the herd so they themselves are not ostracized? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-monitoring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-monitoring So I worry that even if we ask sensitive questions, there will be so much splitting, and so many people who are coy on their responses so as to avoid the people who really make a fuss of stuff. Maybe we'd find people are scared to validate their true feelings and needs. What if environment and fear of being an outcast/ridiculed for showing candor has them in a compliance state? And that'd take us back to psychoanalysts in the 1940's and 50's :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Horney#Theory_of_neurosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Horney#Theory_of_neurosi..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_orientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_orientation. It's hard to come up with a new idea in this space.
- Mirioron 7y ago>What if environment and fear of being an outcast/ridiculed for showing candor has them in a compliance state? It goes further than being outcast. Having the wrong opinion on things can put your career and sometimes physical safety in jeopardy. With costs like that you will always have people hiding their true thoughts. I think one of the most important things to learn in life (for the individual) is to know how to hide what is not popular in your current company.
- gorpomon 7y agoI'm feeling this hard at my place of work. We can't ask probing questions about people's real behaviors and actions, so while projects are running far behind we're not asking why. We're great at keeping a calm head and working towards a solution for today's problem. We have zero capability to reflect on how people's specific actions get us into these problems.
- dmitrygr 7y agoThe one thing that you miss the most after leaving Google is the postmortem culture - the fact that anything that goes wrong will be picked apart for lessons to learn, and said lessons WILL be learned. Trying to get a large org to buy into that idea is just... impossible.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoI'm a regular reader of Ask a Manager (https://www.askamanager.org/ https://www.askamanager.org/), and one thing that comes up over and over is how both managers and employees will avoid awkward topics ranging from trivial ("your breath smells") to consequential ("you need to step up or you'll be fired!"), to the point of going to extremes like quitting the job, just to avoid having a genuine conversation with somebody. And I'm guilty of this too. I used to work with a dude who did not brush his teeth and used to wear the same clothes for a week in a row -- and I don't think anybody ever said a word to him, they just edged away quietly.
- artsyca 7y agoI had a manager like that dude he was house poor and had only one ratty Hilfiger sweater There's no way to relate to people like that and confrontation being avoided is the only way out
- JauntyHatAngle 7y agoWhy is there no way to relate to people like that? Like, an individual you get a vibe from, I get it, but all people who are house poor should be avoided? I'm not sure I follow.
- icebraining 7y agoAvoid confrontation, not people. Plus, a manager at a company presumably has money to buy a couple of sweaters, even if at Goodwill or equivalent.
- artsyca 7y agoI'd have to agree that it's necessary to view the professional sphere in terms of investment and investment is not only financial it's also effort and agency If you're a professional you ought to have some sort of professional persona that's not so directly tied to your 35 year mortgage If all your money is tied up in interest payments to where you can't hardly afford a stitch of clothing what fault of it is mine who manages my money differently do I seriously have to see you wearing the same tired old outfit every day for a week and you're in a position to affect my career to boot?
- jmccorm 7y agoI've gotten a long ways in my technical career from being able to ask sensitive questions. (In the business environment, I've focused more on them being "critical questions".) It has been really great for me, and I've tried to make it as painless as possible for others. It started simply enough. For real business reasons, there are things that I either needed to know, or I needed to be confident that the other person either had the answer to or were were putting some serious thought to. I wasn't asking sensitive questions just to embarrass them. I expected them to give me an honest answer (and I helped make that easier if an honest answer wasn't forthcoming on its own). I learned that I could trust my team not to take any of my questions out of context, and they learned that I would never try to take their answers out of context either. Here are the big takeaways as best as I've been able to pin them down: it is all about trust, personal motivation, and intention. These complications are multiplied by the number of participants (even in situations where one person is asking a question and one person is answering the question, but multiple people may be listening). The process is quick and painless when the trust between the participants is high, the personal motivation (at the cost of others) is low, the level of trust between everyone is high, and there are just the two people. (Can it get better than that? Surprisingly, yes. Consider when one of the participants is a benevolent all-seeing and all-powerful diety.) I have to admit, I haven't read the full article. I'd be curious what dimensions of trust they recorded and how well it coordinated with their results. If you've developed all those factors between all the participants, you can ask just about anything with the minimum of time wasted. As one or more of these factors break down, the more complicated the conversation becomes. Or the more process you need to introduce to smooth over the wrinkles. "Hey, I don't mean to embarrass you, but on the Johnson account it is more important to get an accurate documentation than to show any kind of regular process. See? Here is where we've been capturing this for everyone, and this is what's done with the information." (So then you see how something like transparency comes into play.) I think it makes sense when you look at it in those terms. You also need to be asking questions work asking, and sometimes you're going to be asking questions that you don't want or need the answer to yourself. You might be asking to build up trust within a group of people, or you might be asking because you know that several people really would benefit from knowing something that they're too conditioned to do on their own. (This is where I started. And the key is that even if a question is confrontational, you must never ask in a confrontational tone. The tone of your voice and the content of your words have to reflect that you're asking because you need to know. Nothing personal, just business.) Even still, I hardly consider myself the master. I've never written anything down on this, but this is the 10,000ft view of what I picked up up over the years. If you've spotted something along these lines in a book or an article somewhere, let me know. I'd like to compare notes.
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- 29athrowaway 7y agoPeople prefer to quit a job or fire an employee before having a difficult conversation.
- vitruvian987 7y agoQuitting/firing is a difficult conversation to have.
- closeparen 7y agoHardly anyone gets fired that way. Instead they go in the spreadsheet for the next round of layoffs, which are mechanical and depersonalized.
- authoritarian 7y ago>Instead they go in the spreadsheet for the next round of layoffs, which are mechanical and depersonalized. I've never worked at a company where anyone was fired that way
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lukevdp 7y agoIn my experience it’s a lot easier to have a difficult conversation than to fire someone.
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- crimsonalucard 7y agoBe careful about stuff like this. There's an evolutionary reason for why it's default human behavior to avoid sensitive questions. In general there's sort of a trend with psychology nowadays in how it identifies and teaches us how to deal with our own biases. While I think it's good to understand the origins of our biases it is not completely wise to ignore them because they are their for a reason.
- Consultant32452 7y agoAnyone interested in this topic might find a search for the phrase 'preference falsification' interesting. For a great resource in book form, I highly recommend "Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification" by Timur Kuran. He was recently in The Portal podcast for an even shorter intro.
- gampleman 7y agoMy wife was* one of those rare people who just went ahead and asked people whatever was on her mind. This had a curious effect as I often internally winced and thought "you did not just say that". Sometimes I had the impulse to apologize for her or put in a joke to soften the blow. However, curiously, generally people didn't seem to mind or sometimes registered very mild embarrassment. In very rare cases they just avoided answering the question and she wouldn't press them. But the great thing about it was that one could have really interesting deep conversations with near strangers, because one would skip over all the smalltalk and immediately discuss something everyone cared deeply about. In comparison I would have shyly still been discussing the weather whereas she would be already talking theology. * She does it less now. Perhaps my bad influence or having kids?
- outime 7y agoThat’s a great story and I’m like your wife in that aspect, but just intentionally. Either way you’re lucky to have someone like that around, it can teach you a lot. I’ve experienced very deep, fulfilling connections with strangers (friend of a friend level) and still haven’t found anyone being embarrassed by these questions, but of course nobody else needs to be around as it can quickly be embarrassing. It can also be softened with an honest “if you don’t want to answer I can totally understand” and move on with something else but almost always received a somewhat interesting response. In return, deep/very personal questions are sent my way and I’ve answered them all with the best of my knowledge. I can see how many people are afraid of having real talk (specially introverts, as I was) because it can show your weaknesses, suffering and your potentially “wrong” ideas/thoughts. Truth is, everybody has their fair share of bs going on and being over polite and wasting time in meaningless small talk doesn’t IMHO benefit anybody, and you miss very interesting mindsets and experiences that can make your life much better.
- steverb 7y agoI honestly don't know what a "deep" question sounds like. Is there a list of topics that fall into that category somewhere?
- austincheney 7y agoThe greatest conversational challenges I encounter are not immediately due to sensitivity but indirectly so due to customs, assumptions, and culture. I find many people are deeply fearful of originality and criticality and group defiance when it comes to their operating habits, perceptions, and executing behaviors. In short many people will take drastic steps to irrationally preserve their operating habits as cognitive decisions even in defiance of direct evidence and at risk of eminent failure. Conversations about this are supremely challenging. In my experience the reason why this is so challenging is not due to sensitivity, though sensitivity is certainly present. Instead I find many people are challenged by objectivity as a deeply instilled personality trait. The degree of objectivity acceptance by person is variable and varies further in group dynamics. This is a measurable quality of some behavior analysis tests.