Alison Wood Brooks

I just need a hug, right?

But part of that responsibility is you can literally say, I just need someone to listen or I just need a hug right now.

I actually don't need you to solve this problem before they do the wrong thing.

But of course, there's also – it's complicated because stating your goals explicitly can also undermine them.

If I say like, oh, I just really want to laugh a lot –

I'm not sure that's the right pathway to actually laughing a lot with each other.

So it is a little complicated.

It's a great question, Dave.

So yes, of course, we can all probably think of people in our lives who have asked too many questions or who habitually ask too many questions.

But asking too many questions is much more rare than not asking enough questions actually And and actually sometimes it can happen in predictable contexts for example on first dates

we don't see in our research any tipping point for asking too many questions you have so much to learn about each other in that context and your goals are very aligned it's a very cooperative task on the other hand take for example sales calls which we've also studied there is a tipping point for asking too many questions usually because you're more suspicious of each other's motives or you have colliding purposes you

Are they trying to take advantage of me?

Are they asking about these questions because they want to learn information only to then exploit me and raise the price or something?

But even there, asking too many questions, it turns out to be better than asking too few.

And so what we see in our data is that there is a tipping point.

So for example, on a huge data set of 30-minute sales calls, there is a tipping point where asking four questions per minute starts to go down in terms of likability.

for the other person.

But even there, even if you're at that very high end of asking questions, it's better than being at the very low end where you're not asking enough.

Eduardo, I hear you.

I think it's a fascinating question of who's responsible.