Read anything good lately? Cool, glad to hear — hey, let me tell you about what I just read! In fact, it involves the extremely annoying thing I’m doing right now!
That would be “boomerasking,” which is how Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks describes a very common but almost universally disliked conversational quirk.
It has nothing to do with the Boomer generation. Instead, it goes like this:
Someone asks you a question. You’re flattered! They care about your opinion!
But when you start to answer, it seems as if they’re not even listening. Maybe they don’t let you answer at all.
Finally, impatiently, they dive straight into a story about their experience, or their opinion — as if the whole point of asking you the question was to hijack the conversation so that you’d have to listen to them, instead.
Now Brooks and another professor, Michael Yeomans of Imperial College London, have co-authored a roughly 15,000-word examination of the whole tendency in the Journal of Experimental Psychology — digging into why people fall into the trap, why it annoys so much, and what you can gain by training yourself not to.
It’s annoying!
Despite my boomerasking at the beginning of this newsletter — that was just a narrative example. I try to avoid doing this in real life!
Because it’s annoying, right? Almost everyone agrees.
In an especially clear example, Brooks cites research that suggests that when people go on dates, asking questions and seeming interested in the answers makes it more likely they’ll get a second date, while boomerasking has the exact opposite effect.
“Unfortunately, it turns out that boomerasking is an easy way to undermine the superpower of question asking,” she said.
Bragging, complaining, and sharing
Brooks and Yeomans came up with three categories of boomerasking, including:
Ask-bragging: “Asking a question followed by disclosing something positive, e.g., an amazing vacation”
Ask-complaining: “Asking a question followed by disclosing something negative, e.g., a family funeral”
Ask-sharing: “Asking a question followed by disclosing something neutral, e.g., a weird dream”
But if almost everyone seems to agree that they’re annoyed by boomerasking, why do people do it? Two reasons, mainly.
First, they have a harder time recognizing and categorizing their own boomerasking, as opposed to when other people do it.
Second, they subjectively conclude that the other person in a conversation will like them more and feel included if they start conversations with a question — while not apparently recognizing that asking isn’t the same thing as actively listening to the answer.
Breaking the habit
Brooks and Yeomans also looked at how taking control of the boomerasking habit can help people become better leaders.
For example, a boss who doesn’t realize he or she is prone to boomerasking can create a culture in which employees don’t think their expertise or opinions are valued, which in turn leads to low morale.
“We’ve all had the experience of the bad boss who calls a meeting to ask for people’s feedback on a topic and lets people briefly chime in, only to mostly tell them what he thinks,” Brooks said in an interview. “It’s what drives people nuts about meetings—people come together to take advantage of the hive mind, to share their useful knowledge or feel heard.”
Want to break the habit? Brooks has a few tips:
Try to identify if you do it, learn to show real interest when you ask people questions, and ask questions that you can’t answer yourself easily.
Oh, and maybe call out the elephant in the room by acknowledging the concept of boomerasking, and telling your employees that you’d like them to call you out if you do it.
Got any other ideas?
Seriously, I’m not boomerasking. If you’ve got something to suggest, let us know in the comments.
7 other things worth knowing
Charlie Kirk, the charismatic founder of the nation’s pre-eminent right-wing youth activist group and a close ally of President Trump, was fatally shot on Wednesday while speaking on an Utah college campus. Hours later, investigators continued to search for the killer, with no suspects in custody. Officials had detained two people as part of their investigation, but both were released. His killing prompted outrage from politicians of both parties and from people across the political spectrum. (The New York Times)
Poland said a number of Russian drones entered its airspace during an attack on Ukraine early Wednesday and were shot down with the help of NATO allies, a first since Moscow's full-scale invasion of its neighbor. Leaders across Europe condemned the incident as the latest sign of escalation from the Kremlin. (NBC News)
Prince Harry met with King Charles for the first time in 18 months -- raising hopes their family feud might end. (Daily Mail)
A lost boy wandering a monorail line high above the crowd at Hersheypark was rescued by a park visitor who climbed onto a building and jumped onto the rails. A video posted to social media shows the boy walking along the tracks. One man climbs onto a nearby building and pulls himself onto the tracks, scooping up the boy to cheers from below. (AP)
Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office five days a week. Read the memo. (Business Insider)
New Mexico will become the first state to offer free universal childcare, the governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced this week, an expansion of an existing program that has helped lift tens of thousands of people out of poverty. (The Guardian)
The first of several 2026 World Cup ticket sales “phases” opened Wednesday with a lottery exclusive to customers of a top-tier FIFA sponsor, Visa. (I jumped in.) The application window will shut on Sept. 19 at 11 a.m. ET. When it does, FIFA will weed out bots, then randomly select an undisclosed number of applicants and assign them time slots for purchasing tickets beginning Oct. 1. (The Athletic)
Thanks for reading. Photo by Dmitrii Zhodzishskii on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
This topic reminds me of the seemingly innocuous question "when involved in a conversation, do you listen or wait to talk?" asked in the movie Pulp Fiction. It seems a lot of boomeraskers would do the latter.
I volunteer for one of the oldest and certainly the largest nonprofit organizations that offers free mentoring to small business owners. The 10,000 plus volunteers are guided now by about 20 full-time paid employees and about the same number of paid contractors. Thank you for putting a name to the issue of asking for input just to be able to explain your own decisions. Now I actually know what to call the rather common practice. I agree... "waiting to talk" does not make a good leader at all.