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 Post subject: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Fri Feb 18, 2011 3:17 am 
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Hey Kidd I have a question for you, you told the pokemon trainer about cherry picking the conversation with a girl he was about to see what do you mean by this ??

What is Cherry picking ? Is it just listening to words that could possibly generate interest and getting info about the female potential and getting her to open up about herself as well as making the conversation smooth

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Fri Feb 18, 2011 5:32 am 
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YES! :ugeek:

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:42 am 
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Way of a Natural wrote:
What is Cherry picking ? Is it just listening to words that could possibly generate interest and getting info about the female potential and getting her to open up about herself as well as making the conversation smooth
Yes.

She will drop certain words into the conversation, unconciously (sometimes conciously as well), that have a meaning for her. If you are not paying attention you may miss them, however some will stand out after a while.

They will have an emotional effect on her, they are emotional triggers, either positive or negative. They can also be words that she has a 'tie' to.

You do the same, everyone does, even though you might not realise it.

Some words she will fight against and some she will positively run along with, when dropped into a conversation.

..

Next time you are in a conversation with a woman (or a man), try to pick out the word that she uses the most, one that triggers an emotional reaction and that she has an attachment to - apart from the obvious ones like 'I', 'the' etc. All you have to do is listen, you will hear it over and over during the conversation.
Then during the conversation let your gut tell you what you think that means to her. What is it telling you about her?
What is she telling you, outside of the conversation by repeating that word over and over?

..

Next exercise (on a roll now) is to pick out the questions that THEY want YOU to ask THEM. They will tell you if you listen and are present. These should jump out at you after a while, similar to 'i am saying this, really i want you to ask me more about this or this other thing'.

This is where people talk about the flow of conversation, if you are focussed on yourself you will not see these cues for what they are. If you are present and in the moment, they will give you all you need to continue the conversation, they will feed you with things to ask about and directions to take the conversation without you having to do anything really.

Try to have a conversation without including anything of yourself so to speak, purely based on what they are saying.

..

Using a similar speaking style, word and structure wise is the salesmans best tool in gaining quick rapport. It has been for as long as there have been salesman. A lot of this is down to mirroring these key words and phrases that have positive emotional ties and that the person relates to, this can build rapport really quickly, as you both seem to be 'on the same page'.

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Fri Feb 18, 2011 6:18 pm 
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Putting this in action tonight, stay tuned.... :ugeek:

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Sun Jun 19, 2011 1:15 pm 
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Quote:

Next exercise (on a roll now) is to pick out the questions that THEY want YOU to ask THEM. They will tell you if you listen and are present. These should jump out at you after a while, similar to 'i am saying this, really i want you to ask me more about this or this other thing'.
Alright so I have been doing this sales thing for awhile I was trying to do this but I don't think I'm doing it right I'm having trouble closing the deal. Also I noticed that when people talk too much I get bored and only half listen and I wait for words that actually interest me to continue the conversation. Another thing I noticed was that people interrupt each other a lot because they want to say something or the other person talks too much, so the other person is not able to finish what they were orignially trying to say.

Is there something else to this that I'm missing that could possibly make me better at this ?

How do you know the questions that people want you to ask them ? I might be doing this right I could be doing this wrong but I do want to get better at this so I can fine tune this and be more present and concious about these situations and have it eventually be more natural.

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Sun Jun 19, 2011 1:17 pm 
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Resonance (edited slightly) wrote:
I listen for words that actually interest THEM to continue the conversation.
There

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Sun Jun 19, 2011 1:35 pm 
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Alright thanks :lol:

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Thu Sep 20, 2018 8:34 am 
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Larry King himself, another master and proponent of cherry picking:

Quote:
Question from Shooby: Larry, it’s been said you don’t really interview, you just "have tea" with your guest. How do you respond to this type of criticism?

Larry King: I don't agree with that at all. It is not a conversation, it's an interview. I don't make statements, I don't give my opinion and I don't use the word "I." Everything I say is a question -- usually short, right on the point, and, most importantly, I listen. I am not there to embarrass, nor am I there to hold the guest on a pedestal. I am there to learn. Through me, the audience will learn.

Question from What: Have you learned a lot from working at CNN?

Larry King: I learn every day. Someone once said, "I never learned anything when I was talking." Boy, is that true. So, every night I get to have the experience of meeting interesting people, newsmakers, movers and shakers, wannabes, failures and successes, and I'm kind of a witness to history.

Question from Suzie: Larry, have you ever been at a loss for words?

Larry King: Go back to the Robert Mitchum answer. Usually I'm not, because I'm so intensely curious. By the way, I don't take any credit for that attribute. I was born with it. I remember as a child, asking bus drivers why they wanted to drive a bus, asking policemen why they wanted to be cops. I was always interested in the whys. It's hard to run out of things to ask, especially if you begin most questions with the word "why."

By the way, this is a good tip for anybody in our chat room. If you ask a question that begins with the word "why," it can't be answered in one word.
http://edition.cnn.com/chat/transcripts ... index.html

Quote:
COOPER: Your interviewing style is different than so many other people, and I was asking around to a couple of people who had been on your show about what it is that makes it work so well. And they said that you make guests comfortable, to the point where they feel they can say anything, ... therefore [they] will say to you what they haven't said before, and wouldn't say anywhere else.

KING: I do know this, I know I'm intensely curious ... and I make good eye contact, I listen to the answers, I ask short questions. If you ask a question over two sentences to me, you're showing off. No question should have to take more than two sentences. If you turn on the camera on "Larry King Live," the guest should be on, nine out of 10 times. If I'm on nine out of 10 times, the show is about me. So I never thought the show was about me.

My role is not to make a guest uncomfortable. I know some people like to make a guest uncomfortable. I don't. I'm uncomfortable if I make them uncomfortable, and I, at least in my sense, you don't learn a lot if you're confrontational. So I learned a long time ago that the best way to be is really curious, and people like responding to someone who they know is. Like Sinatra said to me once, "I know you care about my answer, therefore I'm going to answer it because I know you care." I do care. And that's true to this day. Whether it was Anna Nicole Smith or Frank Sinatra or band leaders or presidents, I care about their answer, and then I hope through me it goes to the audience. I'm a conduit. I think that's my role. I'm a conduit.
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/03/23/la ... index.html

Quote:
I was struck by his answer to the question: “You are a master of keeping conversations going? How do you do that?”

Mr. King’s answer was elegant in its simplicity. “I’m a who, what, where, when guy. I ask short questions. I get to the point. The person I am interviewing knows that I am interested in what he or she has to say. They know I’m listening to their answer. I have a pace that is natural.”
https://budbilanich.com/larry-kings-adv ... ersations/

Quote:
When Forbes asked Larry King “What are your three favorite interviewing techniques?”, he offered this advice:

1. Leave yourself at the door. Leave your ego at the door.

2. Listen to the answer because the answer can often give you the next question.

3. Remember, it is your baby. You’re controlling the interview, not the guest. The guest should be the star, and you should learn a lot about the guest, but you are always in control.
https://medium.com/@speakerhubHQ/what-c ... 719a56eeae

Quote:
SIMPLE QUESTIONS

Jesse: Well, that’s what I was going to say. I mean I think one of the things about your interview style that’s special is that you’re a very modest interviewer. Like you are not afraid to ask a simple question, a “what is this” question.

Larry: They’re the best. Because when you think—I watch some of these press conferences, and the question takes longer than the answer. And the people show off. There was no showing off. [The] New Yorker did a piece on me, called it “Street Questions.” I’m a guy in the street. Hey! What are you doin’?

So, when the Gulf War was on, and we would have guests on every night associated with the war: writers, politicians, generals. And I always asked the same question: What happened today? I wasn’t there. You were there. You were covering it. What happened? That’s the simplest question in the world. Why’d you do this? What happened? I don’t know more law than a lawyer. I don’t know more politics than a politician. I don’t, I have opinions. But I’ve never run for office. I’ve never argued a case in front of a jury. I don’t know more medicine than a doctor, I’ve never operated. I’ve never done science. I ask questions of scientists. I’m a layman. I’m a pure layman who’s intensely curious. What I do have is a sense of pace. I know when something’s going well, I know how to draw people out. But I don’t think I could teach a course in it. I don’t know that I have a method. I just know that I go to the basics.

And from the basics, you learn a lot, and you can bring people. One of the best examples I can give is my first interview with Frank Sinatra, who didn’t do a lot of interviews. Jackie Gleason got him for me. And his PR guy said to me, “Frank doesn’t do these things. He’s doing it as a favor to Jackie Gleason. But one thing: do not bring up the kidnapping of his son. He doesn’t want to talk about it, he will not talk about it.” I thought, that’s fair, I don’t have to bring it up, OK.

In the middle of the interview, we’re really in touch. And I asked him, “The thing with you and the press—is it overdone, or have you been bum rapped?” He says, “Well, it might have been overdone. But I’ve been bum rapped. Take my son’s kidnapping.” He brought it up. I just was asking good questions. And that’s the framework of which I like to work. I don’t have to know a great deal about [it]. In fact, my favorite guests are people I don’t know at all. I like doing physicists; I know nothing about physics. I like doing astronomers, because I don’t know about the heavens, but I wonder about them. What is an astronomer when he walks down the street and looks up? What does he think about?

LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN

Jesse: Are you always listening for that little something that stands out? That little interesting bit that you can pull on a little?

Larry: Yeah. Because the key of interviewing is listening. If you don’t listen, you’re not a good interviewer. I hate interviewers who come with a long list of prepared questions. Uh, because they’re going to depend on going from the fourth question to the fifth question without listening to the answer of the fourth question. Because they’re concentrating on what they’re going to ask for the fifth. And that’s not the way it works for me. So I concentrate solely on the answer, and I trust my instincts to come up with questions. Even if the answerer fully answered the question, I’m ready in my head to go somewhere with it. There’s no dead air.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/larr ... g-tips.php

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Thu Sep 20, 2018 9:32 am 
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An interesting post, full of gems
Larry wrote: *
1. Leave yourself at the door. Leave your ego at the door.

2. Listen to the answer because the answer can often give you the next question.

3. Remember, it is your baby. You’re controlling the interview, not the guest. The guest should be the star, and you should learn a lot about the guest, but you are always in control.
Larry wrote: *
So I learned a long time ago that the best way to be is really curious, and people like responding to someone who they know is. Like Sinatra said to me once, "I know you care about my answer, therefore I'm going to answer it because I know you care." I do care. And that's true to this day. Whether it was Anna Nicole Smith or Frank Sinatra or band leaders or presidents, I care about their answer, and then I hope through me it goes to the audience. I'm a conduit. I think that's my role. I'm a conduit.
Spot on

Interviewers, good ones, are very good at cherry picking.

This post reminded me of watching 'chat shows' in my youth, the variety of interviewers and their differing styles, what effect it had on me as a viewer and also the interviewee.. Certainly a good angle to pursue and some good examples out there.

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In building a statue, a sculptor doesn't keep adding clay to his subject.He keeps chiseling away at the inessentials until the truth of its creation is revealed without obstructions. Perfection is not when there is no more to add,but no more to take away.


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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Fri Sep 21, 2018 9:36 am 
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This remind me of the interview Larry made with sienfield, where he forgot some snippet of data from his show and Jerry went berserk on Larry, I dont know how a person like Sienfield can hold such a HUGE MASSIVE EGO inside a bag of meat blood and bones, it's a thing to watch, also how Larry handled it.

The fake smile Sienfield does when he is offended or mad, and the way his upper lip shapes, it makes me cringe so much.

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Sat Sep 22, 2018 10:51 am 
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Quote:
CONAN: What is your secret?

KING: I left myself out of it, I don't use the word 'I'. I ask short questions, listen to the answer. Listening is as important as what you ask because you have to follow up. You've got to listen and you follow up with good questions. I always try to stay on top of things, put guests at ease.

I am naturally curious, insanely curious. You don't want to sit next to me on a plane. 'What do you do, why do you want to do it?' I'm a why person. When I was a kid we were going to Dodgers games at Ebbets Field - other kids would want autographs, I never wanted autographs.. I wanted to ask questions to the players. 'Why did they bunt in the third inning? Why did they do this?'

CONAN: If I'm talking to a beautiful woman I want at the end of the conversation for the beautiful woman to be talking about me. The show is called Conan.

KING: My show is still called Larry but if the woman is interested, if you show more interested in her without being self-involved, she will like you more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGcd6QUDvPA

Quote:
ABOUT THIS INTERVIEW

Larry King says of his approach, "an interview is an interview. It's basically who, what, where, when and why. And while it is certainly kind of an exalted place to sit with the Prime Minister of Great Britain or the president of a country, it's still… 'why do you do what you do? How do you feel about what you do? What do you think about what's happening in the world?' It comes down to an interviewer is an interviewer. I never sat down with a President of the United States or a world leader or head of a country and thought, 'whew, this is the head of a country -- I have to be different!' I'm still every man. What would a guy in the street say to Chirac of France if you had a chance to talk to him?"

"Be yourself. Don't try to be Larry King. Don't be someone else. Be curious. Listen. Listening is more important than what you ask. Because you learn a lot by listening. My motto: I never learned a thing when I was talking."
https://interviews.televisionacademy.co ... larry-king

Quote:
I leave my feelings and ego out the door. That way I can ask better questions. I am not there to argue, I am there to learn. Nobody knows everything.

I am intensely curious, that’s the number one thing about me. And when you are intensely curious you don’t have to think about what you’re gonna ask, you’re gonna ask them 'why did you do this, why did that happen, what happened today?'

The simplest questions are the best.

‘I don’t know. Help me’ is what I am saying. I don’t know, that is basically what I am doing.

A lot of these broadcasters now are pompous, they know. They know more than the guest, they know everything. I don’t learn from that.

Everyone is interesting. There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t think they’re interesting. My job is to make that ‘interesting’ come out.

All you can do is hope for the best. It ain’t brain surgery, the world will go on.

If I go on at 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock will come around.
I do the best I can, it ain’t perfect.
https://theartofcharm.com/podcast-episo ... isode-412/

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Sun Jun 09, 2019 9:21 am 
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Tactics for Asking Good Follow-Up Questions
by Richard Davis
November 07, 2014

https://hbr.org/2014/11/tactics-for-ask ... -questions

Whether you are looking to hire someone, decide whether to trust someone, or enter a business partnership, the better you are at judging people, the better off you will be. Unfortunately, most people are just plain bad at reading others. Several decades of research among psychologists has indicated all sorts of blind spots, biases, and judgment errors we make in assessing people. Much of that research has focused on the mental processes we use to interpret what we see or hear. But errors also occur way before that – the problem can begin with the questions we ask to understand people in the first place.

When you want to get a read on someone, what questions do you ask? Most people have go-to questions. The ones I hear most often are open-ended questions like, “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” “What do you want to be doing in five years?” and “What motivates you?” Some savvier questioners ask behavior-based questions, like “Tell me about a time when you….”. Sounds great, right? Now, ask yourself if you have ever once actually learned the truth about someone by their responses to these questions. How many times have you relied on people’s responses to these questions only to see later that those responses meant nothing at all? Most people ask a question like this and then move onto another topic, seemingly satisfied that they heard what they needed to hear. In reality, they learned nothing about the other person.

In my experience conducting interview-based assessments for the last 12 years, I have found that this is because the first answer to one of these questions is only marginally helpful and may even be irrelevant. Yet most askers simply accept what they hear (good or bad) and, without asking any follow-ups, move on to the next topic on their list.

But the key to understanding people lies in the follow-up question. In my experience, there are two major reasons people don’t ask good (or any) follow-up questions. First, many interviewers aren’t actually paying close enough attention to ask detailed follow-up questions. To ask a good follow-up, you need to pay very close attention to how the interviewee responds to your initial question, and then build on his or her answer. The second reason most people are hesitant to probe is out of fear of offending the other person. But being polite isn’t the same thing as letting the other person off the hook.

Ask a follow-up that will help you really uncover what you are seeking to learn. Be curious, and you will be amazed what you uncover. Here are three types of follow-up questions that will enable you to understand more about a person:

1. Ask your original question again, slightly differently. Don’t be afraid to ask the same question twice. If I am interviewing someone and the person either deflects my first question or doesn’t give a real response, I will often say, “Let me ask you this another way…”. It is effective because you communicate that you are not letting the person off the hook, but you’re allowing them to save face by at least implying that maybe your initial question just wasn’t clear enough. It is a highly effective method of extracting a real response that will actually be predictive of behavior.

Caution: just make sure you change the way you phrase this second question, otherwise it can seem adversarial. The key is to ask the question another way, and declare that you are doing so.

2. Connect their answers to each other. One of my favorite strategies to understand people better is to link their responses to something they said earlier. I’m not talking about an attempt to catch someone in a lie, but instead connecting the dots between their answers. Good judges of character do this naturally – they listen intently, and tie what they hear to something said earlier in the conversation. Ask something like, “Oh, that’s like the time you…?” or, “Is that what you meant earlier when you said…?”. Beyond allowing you to understand the person better, it communicates that you are really listening, and actually provides meaningful insight to the person by pointing out a connection that he or she may have not even seen. It allows you to synthesize information rather than just hear it.

Caution: Overusing this can make you seem like a police detective seeking a “gotcha” moment. Avoid saying things like, “But that’s not what you said earlier…” What I am suggesting is to synthesize rather than interrogate.

3. Ask about the implications of their answer. When people answer a question without being particularly revealing, or by giving a very safe answer, what do you do? For instance, when asked about greatest weakness, someone says, “I’m a perfectionist” or “I work too hard.” Rather than accept answers like that at face value, seek to really understand the person by asking about the implications of their answers. With a self-proclaimed perfectionist, you might ask, “How does your perfectionism play out in the workplace?” or “What are the consequences of your detail orientation?” And don’t stop there – keep asking implication questions until you are satisfied you know what you need to know about the person.

Caution: When asking about implications, avoid being a litigator and turning them into leading questions. Instead, truly be curious about the behavior and what its effects are.

Coming up with a great list of questions is only the first step in conducting an in-depth interview. It’s the follow-up questions that will really tell you who you’re dealing with.

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Sun Jun 09, 2019 2:57 pm 
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The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think?
Erica J. Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian M. Sandstrom, and Margaret S. Clark
Psychological Science
Published September 5, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618783714

Abstract
Having conversations with new people is an important and rewarding part of social life. Yet conversations can also be intimidating and anxiety provoking, and this makes people wonder and worry about what their conversation partners really think of them. Are people accurate in their estimates? We found that following interactions, people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company, an illusion we call the liking gap. We observed the liking gap as strangers got acquainted in the laboratory, as first-year college students got to know their dorm mates, and as formerly unacquainted members of the general public got to know each other during a personal development workshop. The liking gap persisted in conversations of varying lengths and even lasted for several months, as college dorm mates developed new relationships. Our studies suggest that after people have conversations, they are liked more than they know.

Having conversations with new people is a fundamental part of social life. It is how we meet new friends and romantic partners. It is how we ease into a new neighborhood or workplace. It is a basic way we learn about the world. But having conversations with new people is rarely easy.

One of the main difficulties is that it is hard for people to know what their conversation partners really think of them, leaving people uncertain about how much others like them, enjoy their company, and would like to interact again. Why? There are several reasons. First, conversations are conspiracies of politeness in which people do not reveal their true feelings. Second, conversations raise the specter of social rejection, and so people are reluctant to express interest in others in case this interest is not reciprocated. Third, conversations are cognitively demanding, and so even when people do signal how much they like one another, their partners often fail to notice because they are too focused on themselves or too busy planning what to say next. In short, the natural dynamics of conversation can make it hard for people to know how much others like them, and as a result, conversations are often marked by awkwardness and uncertainty (e.g.,
“Did I overstep my bounds?” “Did I talk too much?” “Did they think I was boring?”).

Short of actually knowing how much others like them, people are left to venture their best guess, but people’s best guesses tend to be biased. Specifically, people are often biased by their own internal monologues, which, after social interactions, can be remarkably self-critical and negative, especially with the added uncertainty of talking to someone new. Uncertainty and worries about how one has come across are familiar feelings to anyone who has been involved in a conversation; afterward, people tend to compare themselves unfavorably with their ideal version of themselves (e.g., “My banter wasn’t witty enough.”), ruminate about the worst possible outcomes (e.g., “Does she think I’m a bigot?”), and focus on the things they need to fix for next time (e.g., “I really shouldn’t talk about my ex so much.”). In short, people can be their own greatest critic, but what is hard for people to see is that others do not have this same perspective on their faults. This discrepancy in perspectives causes people to overestimate how harshly others will judge them during social interactions.

This amounts to the following. First, successful conversations require that people know how much others like them and enjoy their company. Second, the dynamics of conversation prevent people from knowing this. Third, left with few alternatives, people estimate how much others like them by assuming that others’ thoughts about them are the same as their own thoughts about themselves. But this is problematic because people’s own thoughts tend to be overly critical. Taken together, these facts suggest that when people have conversations with new people, they will systematically underestimate how much others like them.

We call this mistaken belief the liking gap, and we explored it across five studies. In Study 1a, we tested the hypothesis that after a short conversation, people will underestimate how much others like them. Studies 1b and 2 provided evidence that the liking gap exists not because people fail to signal that they like each other—in fact, the signals are right there for people to see—but, rather, people are too focused on their own self-critical thoughts to notice. Studies 3 and 4 showed that the liking gap exists after short, medium, and long conversations, as well as among the general public in a United Kingdom (UK) sample. Finally, in Study 5, we tracked college dorm mates over the course of an academic year, finding that they too showed sustained evidence of the liking gap. Together, these studies suggest that after people have conversations, they chronically underestimate how much their conversation partners like them and enjoy their company.

Discussion
People in our studies systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company (Studies 1–5), a mistake we call the liking gap. The liking gap persisted over short, medium, and long conversations (Study 3) and even over the course of a year, as suite mates developed new relationships (Study 5). Further, the liking gap was not limited to students but was also observed in members of the general public (Study 4). The liking gap was supported by the fact that people’s thoughts about their own conversational performance tended to be more negative than their thoughts about others’ performance (Study 2).

The liking gap may at first glance appear to contradict what we know about people’s tendency to hold themselves in particularly high regard. Indeed, decades of research have shown that people hold overly favorable views about everything from their marriages to their ability to operate a motor vehicle. However, emerging evidence shows that people’s outlooks can be decidedly less rosy when thinking about their social interactions. Conversation appears to be a domain in which people display uncharacteristic pessimism about their performance.

Important questions remain. Most notably, why are people’s thoughts about their own conversational performance so negative, and why are people’s thoughts about themselves so much more negative than their thoughts about their partners? And why do people not correct for their overly negative thoughts when estimating how much they are liked? Research suggests several reasons.

First, it seems functional for people to call to mind their conversational mistakes so that they can improve for next time. After telling a new story, speakers might think about how to get to the point quicker, fine tune a punchline, or liven up their delivery, and this might make their initial story seem a bit dull by comparison. But listeners do not have this same incentive to improve a partner’s story for next time. For them, their partner’s story got the main point across, the punchline was funny enough, and the delivery seemed perfectly fine. In short, people’s harsh inner critic can be functional when it comes to self-improvement, but we suspect that this prevents people from realizing how positively others evaluate them.

Second, people have higher standards for themselves than they do for others. This is in part because people have direct access to how good their conversational performance could have been (e.g., “Last time I told this story, I did a better job”; “I can’t believe I forgot the part about how we went camping in our backyard”; “Maybe it’s because I’m sleep deprived”). In other words, people can easily compare their actual conversational performance with their ideal, but others do not have access to this same ideal. Moreover, other people’s expectations for what it is like to have a conversation with someone new are often pretty dismal. So, whereas speakers are thinking that they have failed to live up to their ideal, listeners are thinking that it could have been much worse, and this different standard of comparison for oneself and for others may well be one reason that people underestimate how much their conversation partners enjoy their company.

Third, people overestimate how much their feelings are on display in social interactions. For example, people think that the self-consciousness they feel is readily apparent to those around them, even when that is not the case. In people’s minds, they are stammering and nervous and searching for the right words, but others cannot see the inside of their minds; rather, they are paying attention to overt behavior. And it just so happens that people’s overt behavior is often initiated unconsciously and is, for the most part, quite likable. Years of practice have largely shaped people into pleasing conversation partners who gaze, and laugh, and smile, and pause, and gesture, and speak, and take turns in ways that sync with their conversation partners. In short, consciously, people feel like their social awkwardness is on display, but unconsciously, people are executing behavior that makes for remarkably smooth conversations.

In sum, one of life’s greatest fears is social evaluation. And so it makes sense that people are vigilant to any potential causes for embarrassment or social awkwardness. In addition, people call to mind their social flaws to fix for next time, people have access to their ideal selves to which their actual selves cannot live up, and people think their social awkwardness is on display more than it really is. Taken together, it seems understandable why people’s thoughts about their own social performance might be overly negative and how this might lead them to underestimate how much others like them and enjoy their company.

Coda
Conversations have the power to turn strangers into friends, coffee dates into marriages, and interviews into jobs. But part of what makes conversations difficult is that people do not know what their conversation partners really think of them, and so people use their own thoughts as a substitute, but their own thoughts tend to be more negative than reality. The result is that people systemically underestimate how much their conversation partners like them and enjoy their company. Conversations are a great source of happiness in our lives, but even more than we realize, it seems, as others like us more than we know.

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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.


Last edited by zogler on Sun Jun 09, 2019 3:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Sun Jun 09, 2019 3:22 pm 
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The Liking Gap
Having conversations with new people is an important and rewarding part of social life. Yet conversations are also intimidating and anxiety provoking, and people wonder and worry about what their conversation partners really think of them. Are people accurate in their estimates? We found that following interactions people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company, an illusion we call the liking gap. We observed the liking gap as strangers got acquainted in the lab, as first year college students got to know their dorm mates, and as formerly unacquainted members of the general public got to know each other during a professional development workshop. The liking gap persisted in conversations of varying lengths, and even for the better part of a year as college dorm mates developed new relationships. Our studies suggest that after people have conversations, they are liked more than they know.
http://www.ericaboothby.com/research#/new-page-1/

Media Coverage

Time
Quote:
“We don’t know what other people are thinking, and so we substitute our own thoughts about ourselves for what other people think,” Cooney explains. “We’re basically projecting what we think of our own performance, and assume that’s what other people think of us.”

“We always have this post-mortem with ourselves. That little voice in your head turns on, and you start thinking about your conversation,” Cooney says. “Be suspicious of this voice and its accuracy.”

ScienceDaily
Quote:
"They seem to be too wrapped up in their own worries about what they should say or did say to see signals of others' liking for them, which observers of the conservations see right away," Clark noted.

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Sun Jun 09, 2019 4:43 pm 
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It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask: Question-Asking Increases Liking
Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Julia Minson, and Francesca Gino
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Published April 27, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000097

Abstract
Conversation is a fundamental human experience that is necessary to pursue intrapersonal and interpersonal goals across myriad contexts, relationships, and modes of communication. In the current research, we isolate the role of an understudied conversational behavior: question-asking. Across 3 studies of live dyadic conversations, we identify a robust and consistent relationship between question-asking and liking: people who ask more questions, particularly follow-up questions, are better liked by their conversation partners. When people are instructed to ask more questions, they are perceived as higher in responsiveness, an interpersonal construct that captures listening, understanding, validation, and care. We measure responsiveness with an attitudinal measure from previous research as well as a novel behavioral measure: the number of follow-up questions one asks. In both cases, responsiveness explains the effect of question-asking on liking. In addition to analyzing live get-to-know-you conversations online, we also studied face-to-face speed-dating conversations. We trained a natural language processing algorithm as a “follow-up question detector” that we applied to our speed-dating data (and can be applied to any text data to more deeply understand question-asking dynamics). The follow-up question rate established by the algorithm showed that speed daters who ask more follow-up questions during their dates are more likely to elicit agreement for second dates from their partners, a behavioral indicator of liking. We also find that, despite the persistent and beneficial effects of asking questions, people do not anticipate that question-asking increases interpersonal liking.

Imagine this scenario: you meet a new colleague for the first time at a company party. You strike up a conversation, and the colleague starts telling you a funny story. You are interested and engaged, and you ask several questions that encourage the colleague to elaborate on the details of the story. After the story is over, you exchange pleasantries and part ways. Later you realize that your colleague didn’t ask any questions about you, and you didn’t have an opportunity to reveal much information about yourself. Who made the better impression?

Conversation is a pervasive human experience. Conversing with others is a fundamental behavior across myriad contexts, relationships, and modes of communication (e.g., written, spoken). People can choose from many ways to contribute to a conversation, including making a statement, telling a story, making a quip or joke, apologizing, giving a compliment, or saying nothing at all while a conversation partner speaks. We converse with others to learn what they know—their information, stories, preferences, ideas, thoughts, and feelings—as well as to share what we know while managing others’ perceptions of us. That is, two central goals of conversation are information exchange and impression management. In this article, we examine an understudied conversational behavior that likely influences both of these goals: question-asking.

Although question-asking is ubiquitous, we know very little about the antecedents and consequences of asking questions during interpersonal interaction. In the current research, we investigate the psychology of question-asking as a social phenomenon. We measure people’s natural rates of question-asking and explore how the propensity to ask questions influences interpersonal liking across controlled experimental settings and an observational field setting. Compared with people who ask few questions, we expect that high question askers are better liked. In particular, asking questions that follow up on the other person’s responses may cause and convey better listening, understanding, validation, and care (i.e., responsiveness). The question asker’s responsiveness, in turn, is likely to cause him or her to be better liked by the question answerer.

Question-Asking in Conversation
A conversation is a cooperative interaction in which each person acts in coordination to contribute to a successful experience of shared understanding. It is an ongoing, sequential unfolding of actions and responses, organized as speaker turns. Most conversations are characterized by the transfer of information about beliefs, thoughts, or emotions from one person to another. In the current work, we investigate the social phenomenon of asking questions that encourage the partner to elaborate on their beliefs, thoughts, and emotions.

Question-asking directs conversations by encouraging another person to answer. Though some people may ask questions to avoid disclosing information themselves, most questions function to solicit information from others. If one person asks a question, the other person’s response should abide by basic conversational maxims, such as responding with the relevant information to the question at hand. Although, some recent work suggests that people could violate these norms by dodging questions, responding with truth that is deliberately misleading (i.e., paltering), or refusing to answer altogether.

The type of question-asking we investigate—natural, conversational questions that elaborate on the question-responder’s statements— differ categorically from the questions investigated in studies on experimentally induced social closeness. This prior work has defined social closeness as the inclusion of the other in the concept of the self. In this work, participants were instructed to ask a fixed list of questions that change topic but increase in intimacy over time, and partners take turns answering all questions. For example, each partner would take turns asking and answering the question “What do you value most in a friendship?” before moving on to asking and answering the question “What is your most treasured memory?”. In these studies, questions were provided by an experimenter, and participants were not instructed or encouraged to ask follow-up questions. In contrast, in our work, we investigate the effect of question-asking on liking in natural dyadic interactions.

We focus on information-seeking questions in which the question-asker lacks some information and requests more information from the other person. People often ask information-seeking questions when meeting for the first time, and are more likely to seek information from others when they consider the information highly valuable. Because people often know very little about each other upon first meeting, individuals stand to learn a large amount of information about their conversation partners during first encounters. Importantly, though, information exchange is not the only goal of conversation. Asking questions may serve and influence other motivations like impression management.

Question-Asking and Liking
Most people have an intrinsic desire to be liked by others. Being liked by others influences interpersonal attraction, relationship development, and other important outcomes such as acceptance and
inclusion in groups.

Because the content of a conversation can significantly influence the extent to which the participants like each other afterwards, it is important to examine conversation as a process that influences
attraction and relationship development. The effect of conversational content on interpersonal liking has been demonstrated across a wide array of conversational strategies, ranging from other-focused behaviors, such as giving a compliment or acknowledging another person’s ideas, to self-focused behaviors, such as talking about oneself. However, to our best knowledge, no prior research has investigated whether and how asking questions may influence liking.

Though asking questions invites information disclosure, there are many reasons why people may not ask questions. First, people may not think to ask questions at all. Neglecting to ask questions altogether may happen because people are egocentric—focused on expressing their own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs with little or no interest in hearing what another person has to say. Or they may be too distracted by other aspects of the conversation (e.g., emotion expression) that they do not realize that asking a question is an option. On the other hand, some people may think to ask questions, but may purposefully forgo asking because they are unsure about which question(s) to ask or worry about asking a question that is perceived as rude, inappropriate, intrusive, or incompetent. In these cases, it may be much easier to talk about oneself instead.

Indeed, in most conversations, people predominantly share information about themselves rather than discussing other possible topics. A study of conversations in public settings such as bars and trains suggests that people spend two thirds of conversation time talking about their personal experiences. Especially when meeting someone new, people tend to use self-focused presentation strategies like self-promotion. For example, Marr and Cable (2014) found that job candidates excessively attempt to “sell” themselves to make a favorable impression in job interviews.

The tendency to focus on the self when trying to impress others is misguided, as verbal behaviors that focus on the self, such as redirecting the topic of conversation to oneself, bragging, boasting, or dominating the conversation, tend to decrease liking. In contrast, verbal behaviors that focus on the other person, such as mirroring the other person’s mannerisms, affirming the other’s statements, or coaxing information from the other person, have been shown to increase liking.

We hypothesize that asking more questions—and in particular, asking more follow-up questions—increases liking for the question asker. This hypothesis is consistent with prior research. For example, at the trait level, people who tend to draw out more information from their conversation partners (termed “openers”) are better liked by their partners in long-term relationships. And studies of doctor–patient communication suggest that patients report higher satisfaction with their visits when physicians ask more questions about the patients’ experiences. Furthermore, because most people spend the majority of their conversations sharing their own views rather than focusing on the other person, we hypothesize that people do not anticipate the effect of question-asking on liking.

General Discussion
Conversations are complex social interactions, fraught with decisions about what to say and how to behave. Although most adults have decades of experience conversing with others, our data suggest that people often fail to engage in behaviors that will help them make the most positive impression. Whereas prior data demonstrate that people tend to talk about themselves, our results suggest this may not be an optimal strategy. Instead, across several studies, we find a positive relationship between question-asking and liking. Furthermore, we identify an important psychological mechanism: the effect of question-asking is driven by an increase in perceived responsiveness, which leads question-recipients to like their partners more. Across our studies, we find support for this mechanism using both an attitudinal and a behavioral measure of responsiveness. In particular, we identify follow-up questions as an important behavioral indicator of responsiveness, and we find that asking a higher rate of follow-up questions reliably predicts partner liking.

By asking third-party observers to rate conversations, we tested whether question askers are liked because they are more responsive, or because question-asking is a signal of traits that are inherently likable—for example by signaling interest, empathy, or superior social skills. Instead, we found that high question-askers were not liked any more by third-party observers than were low question-askers. This result dovetails with our findings on follow-up questions, perhaps suggesting a boundary condition. Because a third-party observer is not present in the conversation by definition, none of the questions being asked can follow up on anything they have said. These results provide converging evidence that people like question-askers because they perceive question-askers as more responsive (to them personally).

In this research, we find evidence that people do not anticipate the effect of question-asking on liking. This is true when they are in the role of question-asker, question-receiver, and third-party observer. Thus, it seems that people are largely unaware that asking questions has social benefits. Indeed, third-party raters seemed to like questionresponders more, perhaps because they were interested in the information that responses provide. This result may explain why low question-asking persists in social interaction: individuals may recall that while observing conversation, they liked or found interesting high question-responders.

Last, we investigated conversations in the ecologically valid context of speed-dating, where people are motivated to make a good impression during a first encounter. We found that people who asked a higher rate of follow-up questions were asked on more second dates. Using a machine learning analysis of the question contents, we found a positive relationship between follow-up questions and liking in this context, but not between other types of questions and liking. The findings from Study 3 provide correlational evidence supporting the experimental evidence from Studies 1 and 2 that follow-up questions, as a behavioral measure of responsiveness, are particularly likely to increase liking. Furthermore, we measured question-asking across many interactions for each person, and found evidence that asking follow-up questions is a relatively stable trait over time. The results from Study 3 suggest that follow-up question-asking is a desirable trait that people may seek in potential partners.

Theoretical Implications
Our work makes several fundamental theoretical contributions to an array of existing literatures. First, our work contributes to the understanding of responsiveness within the context of conversations. When Person A asks Person B more questions, particularly follow-up questions, Person B will like Person A more as a result. People want to be heard and validated by others. The question-asker, by expressing interest and engagement, serves a validating role as a valuable conversation partner—indeed, one with whom people want to interact in the future. Prior research has conceptualized responsiveness as understanding, validation, and care, and we show that an important behavioral indicator of responsiveness is asking more follow-up questions in a conversation. Follow-up questions appropriately elaborate on the content of the partner’s message, and signal that the content is worth continuing to discuss. Responsiveness has previously been conceptualized in close relationships, and we build on recent work that studies responsiveness in casual encounters and first meetings, by identifying a behavior that can signal responsiveness during conversations.

Second, our work contributes to extant research about active listening, which has been previously investigated across fields such as communications, crisis communication, and marital therapy but has been largely overlooked in social psychology. We identify and show evidence that question-asking is a critical component of active listening. Bridging the literatures of communications and social psychology, we suggest that question-asking is an important indicator of both active listening and responsiveness, and we open the pathway for future research to investigate active listening as a social psychological construct.

Third, our finding that people fail to predict the effect of question-asking on liking contributes to previous work on prediction and forecasting errors. We suspect that people may show a truncation error specific to conversational experiences: When people simulate conversations, they tend to only imagine what they would say at one time point, rather than the timing and responsiveness of dialogue as the conversation unfolds. This prediction error could additionally help to explain why people tend to talk about themselves during a conversation rather than ask many questions. At any one time point, it is easier to offer statements about the self, since that information is more easily accessible compared to responses that are contingent on the partner’s response. Thus, people fail to predict the effect of question-asking on liking when reflecting on conversation and when engaged in a conversation.

Fourth, these findings contribute to a literature about interpersonal interaction and intimacy in longer-term relationships. The process of interacting with another person affects outcomes such as attraction and intimacy in relationships Although our work only looked at first-encounters, it is likely that the effect of question-asking on responsiveness and liking extends to repeated interactions and longer term relationships. Previous work has found that social closeness increases as people reciprocally answer questions that grow increasingly more intimate. But this work has focused on full-switch questions, provided in advance by an experimenter. Our results focus on follow-up questions in natural conversation, and suggest that follow-up questions, as an indicator of responsiveness, may be an important factor for attraction and intimacy in longer term relationships.

Finally, even though question-asking seems to be a relatively stable trait across individuals, people can learn to ask more questions. In Studies 1 and 2, we manipulated question-asking, showing that it is remarkably easy to induce people to ask more questions. This suggests that question-asking is a skill that can be learned. For example, if a person consistently receives positive feedback (such as liking from the other person, or more second dates) for asking more questions during a conversation, she could learn to associate question-asking with positive outcomes, and change her conversational behavior. Over time, given a choice to talk about oneself or ask more questions in a conversation, a person could tend to choose the latter. This is consistent with work showing that active listening skills can be improved with training.

Conclusion
People spend most of their time during conversations talking about their own viewpoints and tend to self-promote when meeting people for the first time. In contrast, high question-askers—those
that probe for information from others—are perceived as more responsive and are better liked. Although most people do not anticipate the benefits of question-asking and do not ask enough questions, people would do well to learn that it doesn’t hurt to ask.

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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.


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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Sun Jun 09, 2019 4:54 pm 
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People Will Like You More If You Start Asking Followup Questions
Quote:
“Compared to those who do not ask many questions, people who do are better liked and learn more information from their conversation partners,” says Alison Wood Brooks, assistant professor and Hellman Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School. “This strategy does both. It’s an easy-to-deploy strategy anyone can use to not only be perceived as more emotionally intelligent, but to actually be more emotionally intelligent as well.”

Be careful, though. Asking too many questions can have the reverse effect, the research shows. “Asking a barrage of questions without disclosing information about yourself may come across as guarded, or worse, invasive,” Brooks says.

Brooks, who has been fascinated by “why people don’t ask more questions” since grade school, has mulled over this topic in many discussions with her mother, whom she thanks in the study. “My mom, a talented natural psychologist, and I would often reflect on why people don’t ask more questions. What holds them back?”

One reason might be ego. People may be so focused on sharing what they know that they aren’t considering what they might learn from others. Or, they may think to ask a question, but are afraid of asking one that is perceived as rude, intrusive, or incompetent.

But, there’s a third, darker reason. Potential questioners, such as a manager, may not ask because they don’t care about the answers—they may feel apathy or disinterest in what the other person has to say.

“This type of apathy is often misplaced—we have much to learn from others, perhaps especially from those lower in status than ourselves,” Brooks says.

“Every workplace has norms and rules of conduct, explicit and implicit. There are rules of appropriateness. And rules of professionalism,” Brooks says. “It is possible that we are more likely to make conversational mistakes at work and violate these rules and norms and expectations.”

A job interview is one circumstance that may benefit from asking more questions. For example, standard practice suggests that a potential new boss is expected to do the asking. But asking more questions as a job candidate may show how much you can contribute in a potential job, that you are an engaging listener with high emotional intelligence. Plus, the manager may like you more.

“We don’t have many evidence-based prescriptions about what you can do to become more emotionally intelligent or to take other people’s perspectives,” Brooks says. "In fact, there’s research that shows even if you tell people, ‘try to put yourself in other person’s shoes,’ we aren’t very good at it.”

The right way to question

For those who aren’t natural question-askers, Brooks recommends heading into any conversation with an explicit goal of asking questions.

“Think to yourself, I need to ask at least five questions in this conversation, or, I need to ask questions in this conversation, listen to the answers, and ask follow-up questions. It’s easy to do, and — even better — requires almost no preparation.”

The researchers are interested in looking at other areas, now that they’ve established a link between question-asking and liking.

Potential areas include: What happens in extreme situations when someone asks zero questions, or, when they ask 50? What can be gleaned about gender, status, age, or personality from question-asking in conversation? What can be learned from groups in terms of productivity or happiness when it comes to question asking?

What do you think?

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Wed Jul 29, 2020 10:32 pm 
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

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 Post subject: Re: Cherry Picking
PostPosted: Wed Jul 29, 2020 10:42 pm 
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Enjoying the links and posts zogler :)

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