“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was the colloquial term for official U.S. military policy from 1993 to 2011. What was that all about? Americans born on or before about 1973 probably remember—it concerned the armed forces approach to homosexuality. Actually, the entire policy was “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue, and don’t harass,” and it was Bill Clinton’s and the Legislature’s way simultaneously to both address and avoid the issue.
The policy is one obvious example of questioning and answering influences on human psychology and interpersonal relationships. All people personally are inclined to ask about some issues and to avoid others. Knowing those inclinations of your own can empower you to make good decisions. For instance, given the current toxic social environment, most of us have learned to be very circumspect about what formerly would have been casual, harmless political questions and answers.
Even folk wisdom and popular entertainment have touted the value of the avoidance technique. For instance, in the Disney cartoon, "Bambi," (first released in 1942) a diminutive, shy bunny, Thumper, quietly advised, "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all."
So, what does psychology say about avoidant questioning and answering? As usual, I will discuss just an idea or two. First, consider context. Your status vis-à-vis your conversation partner is, of course, critical. Can you obviously avoid answering without undue negative repercussions? Is the topic very serious, marginally so, or light? What about your interlocutor? Is it important for you to save face or impress that person?
Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John (2018) divide questions as occurring within a cooperative context and within a challenging one. In cooperative situations, the relative risk would be avoiding a correct uncomfortable answer but, in the process, inadvertently providing another one unfavorable to you. That can happen if you are so relaxed that you do not sufficiently monitor that which you say, and, therefore, say too much. The excess could be quantitative or qualitative, either by rambling on too long, or by revealing sensitive information.
Answering questions within a challenging context, of course, is more likely to produce negative consequences for you. Accordingly, Brooks and John recommend, ideally, that you enter such conversations after having already decided what to keep private. They also want you to be mindful of the importance of maintaining trust, and, therefore, try not to blatantly refuse answering proffered questions.
Bitterly and Schweitzer (2020) elaborate the basic principles presented above, but they focus on describing five answer avoidance strategies much more than assessing their pros and cons. The first is simply to decline answering, with its attendant risks. The second is to blatantly lie and hope to get away with it. Third, is to palter—provide a truthful answer or partial answer that deliberately avoids revealing information that the questioner clearly wants to know. Fourth, one could dodge the question, avoiding it by giving an answer sufficiently close to the original question that the questioner readily accepts it. Fifth, and finally, avoidance can be achieved via deflection. There are two common approaches to do so. One can evade answering a direct question by presenting a new one, or by injecting an emotional distraction, such as a joke.
The aforementioned study offered some advice about question avoidance. Those who avoided direct questions by deflection were less likely to be regarded as untrustworthy or unlikeable than were those who used the other assessed strategies. However, with those findings in mind, Bitterly and Schweitzer provided some suggestions to questioners. They encouraged questioners to anticipate deflection, to have plans to counter it, and to persist in those efforts. If the deflection simply cannot be remedied, questioners should know how to interpret the deflections, and to factor that information into their judgements about the issue, the deflector, and the deflector’s sensitivities.
Perhaps, in some situations, “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue, and don’t harass” policy is good general advice. Brooks & John and Bitterly & Schweitzer seem to agree. But neither of their works said one word about my preferred method of avoiding difficult questions. I would rather metacommunicate - communicate about the communicaiton - to handle the to-be-avoided question. The metacommunication strategy allows one to be both honest and empowered. Why not provide an authentic reason for your reluctance to answer? Ninety-nine percent of the time, your interlocutor will accept your legitimate reason, and agree to defer the question, at least temporarily. Of course, that strategy will not suffice in some special situations. But, more often than not, if your conversation partner cannot accept your wish to defer a question, maybe you need to rethink your relationship with them.
References
Bitterly, T. B., & Schweitzer, M. E. (2020). The economic and interpersonal consequences of deflecting direct questions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(5), 945-990. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000200
Brooks, A. W. & John, L. K. (2018). The surprising power of questions. Harvard Business Review, May 17.
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