The Follow-Up Question: The Small Conversational Habit That Makes People Like You More

Does asking questions really make people like you more?

Yes, on the best evidence available — but with a specific shape that matters. In a set of studies from Harvard, people who asked more questions in a getting-to-know-you conversation were liked more by their partners, and the boost came mostly from follow-up questions: questions that invite the other person to say more about what they just said.¹ The mechanism was responsiveness — the partner’s sense of being heard, understood and cared about. And a newer line of work shows the flip side: a question asked as a launch pad for talking about yourself tends to make people like you less.³

The study: questions in a 15-minute chat

Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Julia Minson and Francesca Gino paired up strangers for 15-minute online chats. In the first experiment (199 pairs), one person in each pair was quietly instructed to ask either at least nine questions or at most four. Afterward, their partners rated how much they liked them. The high-question askers were liked significantly more.¹ A second experiment, in which both partners were assigned a question condition, replicated the effect.¹

The researchers then sorted every question by type. The biggest category, at about 41% of all questions, was the follow-up: “Oh, you’re learning guitar — what got you started?” Others switched to a fresh topic, mirrored a question back (“And you?”), or were routine openers. When they looked at which type was doing the work, it was the follow-ups. The share of follow-up questions predicted how responsive partners felt the asker was, and that in turn predicted liking.¹

Then it held on real speed dates

Lab chats are one thing. The team also analysed recordings from a speed-dating event: 110 people, about 1,960 four-minute dates. People who asked a higher share of follow-up questions were more likely to get a “yes” for a second date. In the authors’ words, an 8% difference in follow-up question rates was associated, on average, with success on one additional date over an evening of 20.¹ Other kinds of questions showed no such relationship.¹

That speed-dating result is correlational — people who ask lots of follow-ups may differ in other ways, and the paper notes that question-asking looked like a fairly stable personal trait.¹ It was later challenged by other researchers using a different statistical model; the original authors replied that the critique had tested the wrong outcome and that, analysed correctly, asking more questions still went with receiving more second-date offers.² The experimental chat studies are where the causal evidence lives.

Nobody sees it coming — not even observers

The quietly striking part is how invisible this effect is. People told to ask lots of questions did not predict that their partner would like them more.¹ And when the researchers showed the transcripts to 612 outside observers, those observers did not like the question-askers more either. If anything, they warmed to the people who were answering the questions.¹

That fits the mechanism. A follow-up question is a gift to one specific person, the one whose story it picks up. From the outside it just looks like someone asking questions; from the inside it feels like being listened to. It also fits a broader finding: people find talking about themselves genuinely rewarding. In brain-imaging and behavioural studies, disclosing information about the self engaged reward-related brain regions, and in one study participants gave up roughly a quarter of the money they could have earned on certain trials in order to talk about themselves instead.⁴

Why the fear of prying is mostly miscalibrated

A common reason people stop at surface questions is worry about seeming nosy. Two lines of research suggest that worry is usually overblown. In five experiments with 1,427 participants, Einav Hart, Eric VanEpps and Maurice Schweitzer found that people systematically overestimate the interpersonal cost of asking sensitive questions — and that people who were asked something sensitive, such as about their salary, rated the asker just as favourably as someone who asked an ordinary question.⁵

Similarly, across a dozen experiments, Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found that strangers expected deeper conversations to be more awkward and less enjoyable than they turned out to be, and underestimated how interested the other person would be in their more personal answers.⁶ None of this licenses interrogation. It does suggest that the question you are hesitating over is usually less risky than it feels.

How to use this

The honest limits

A few things to hold loosely. The experimental evidence comes from short online chats between strangers on a research platform; the speed-dating evidence is observational. Neither tells you how this plays out in a long friendship, a tense meeting, or a negotiation, and the authors say plainly that questions probably work differently in competitive settings and that rude or badly timed questions would not help.¹ The boomerasking studies leaned heavily on recalled experiences and written or video scenarios, with one study of natural conversations.³

One more piece of context, for transparency. Francesca Gino, a co-author of the original question-asking paper, later became the centre of a data-fabrication controversy over separate studies. Her co-authors have stated that she did not collect the data for any of the studies in this paper, and they have posted the full data and analysis code publicly while an independent audit of the paper is carried out.⁷ The later boomerasking work, by two of the original authors without Gino, uses entirely separate data and points in the same direction.³

What survives is a modest, practical conclusion. Questions are not a likability trick — they are a way of showing attention, and the kind that shows attention most clearly, the follow-up, is the kind that helps. If you want to practice catching the details worth following up on, our practice scenarios are a low-stakes place to try. It’s free to start and needs no sign-up.