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I also find a similar technique useful when searching online. If you search "do Aliens exist?" or "does teflon cause cancer" you're guaranteed to find articles that match the bias of your question. Instead, search "extraterrestrial life" or "teflon health effects" or similar terms that are likely to match articles that both agree and disagree with the premise in question. You will end up significantly more informed from the results.

The most significant time that I made this mistake was during the attempted coup in Turkey.

I was living close to Istiklal Street, and I was woken up by a very loud boom. I was pretty sure it was a sonic boom but wanted to make sure. The smart thing would have been to search for "Explosion Istiklal" or maybe even "Boom Istiklal". Instead, I searched for "Bomb Istiklal", and of course I found the 7 people who had leapt to conclusions.

It took me a while to realize I also needed to search for other alternatives, that was a good lesson in the availability bias.

I was taught that by a sales guy. Never ask a yes/no question. Don't ask "Are you satisfied with your current provider?" rather "What do you like/dislike about your current provider?". The wrong answer to a yes/no question ends the conversation.

In a job I had as a student, I had to sell a product over the phone. My boss told me to ask a couple of obvious leading questions first. The point was to get the customer to say „yes“ a couple of times, before trying to sell the product.

I was very ineffective and got fired after a week.

I read a book recently suggesting the opposite. That it's much more effective to get them to say No right out of the gate. People feel like they are in control when they say "No."

Yes there's a psychological principle at work there, when you ask a serious of "softball" questions that are intended to get the respondent to agree, blatantly so, the respondent's "radar goes up", so to speak. I've heard someone give this approach -- and its unintended consequence -- a name, but currently it escapes me. And yes, the gentlemen I'm thinking of was in sales, technical sales actually.

I assume people are meant to find the second question easier to answer? But I don’t know why. The first gives you some vital information for pulling this interaction off successfully. It tells you the speaker liked the movie (or hated it, depending on tone of voice), so you’d better think about how vehemently you want to disagree with them. The second sounds like a trap! If you say “boy, it sucked!” and the speaker loved it, they might not like that! It only works if you trust the speaker to be some kind of enlightened being who never gets offended. If I didn’t know the speaker well, I’d be tempted to give a really wishy-washy non-answer to the second question.

The point is to shift conversations from opinion to insight.

Instead of getting someone’s opinion about something, which is ultimately subjective and of little benefit, you are trying to get unique insights into the subject that you may have not considered which can be very beneficial.

I hear suggestions like this occasionally, and I don't get it. Apparently sentences like "Did you like the movie?", which sound to me like perfectly neutral questions, actually have a slant.

Which way is this question leading me to answer? How can I tell? "Yes" and "No" seem equally acceptable answers here. I don't see how either one would "displease the asker", without knowing more about the situation.

The framing suggests that the asker did like the movie. It makes it harder to answer in the negative because some (most) folks have an instinct to achieve social consensus. I think it's a society-wide learned defense mechanism against tribalism in the presence of allies. Maybe a good test for these sorts of questions is to add the word "also" at the end.

I think it can lean either way depending on how you ask it ("Did you like the movie??").

However, regardless of leaning, the non-leaning version feels like it will generate more interesting responses, while "Did you like it?" is likely to elicit a "yes" or "no".

‘Like’ is a positive verb so it’s not a neutral question.

More importantly it directs you to frame your reaction on a simple like-dislike axis, when the full spectrum of your opinion is probably more complex, and eliciting that yields a better conversation.

The problem with the question is that it reduces an infinite dimensional space (all the things you could have thought about the movie) into a single scalar value. Your mind is likely to be preoccupied with performing that projection which is fundamentally uninteresting.

It’s like asking “Is the pharmaceutical industry good or bad?” vs. “How should the pharmaceutical industry participate in society over the next 20 years?”

It's ok to ask follow-up Why questions.

But the opening of a conversation influences the rest of it. It's like the old experiment about guessing the number of countries in Africa.

What do you think about follow-up questions?

You are right that there are two acceptable answers to the question. How does this compare to the number of acceptable answers to the other question?

My favorite way to ask this question is “What did you (dis)like about the movie?”

Makes the question more open ended and encourages the person to dig deep for answers and think critically.

"Did you like the movie?"

"Did you hate the movie?"

The idea is that people are more comfortable answering yes to a yes/no question.

It's also overly simplistic and tends towards binary outcomes. Yes. No. Conversation over.

It was a two hour movie, surely the answer is more complicated! Caveat: does not apply to all movies.

I am with you here, it seems perfectly neutral question to me.

But this reminds me of a time when I went to movies with some younger family memeber and their friends. After the movie they asked each other if they loved the movie. To me love was really strong word. I wanted to say I liked it, not loved it but then I thought no need to be negative here. So I just said yes.

So when people ask did you like the movie, many people subconsciously say yes even if they disliked it.

This is well said. This reminds me of this wonderful dialogue from `Yes, Prime Minister`: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA

Eh. I don’t know if I’d frame it the same way?

When I think about this, the only time I’m getting single word responses is when someone wants to kill a conversation. If you’re finding this happening a lot because you /only/ ask yes/no questions and/or people don’t feel free/comfortable/interested to tell you more past that then that’s the issue. You can try to ask more open ended questions rather than thinking of it as leading vs non leading. (You’re almost always asking leading questions in real life. Context is abundant) Ones with more potential ways of answering can be good for those who are not as conversational/literal. But be prepared for the conversation killer of, “I didn’t like it.” It will happen...

Not heard this term before - I believe this is often called "open Vs closed questions" (where open questions are the open-ended ones that cannot be answered with yes or no).

"did you like the movie?" doesn't seem like a leading question to me. It's just a yes/no question so it's certainly not the best question to ask for an open ended discussion compared to the "what did you think about the movie".

A better example of a leading question in my opinion would be something like "how much did you like the movie?" where the question is loaded with the premise that the person actually did like the movie.

Yet there's no universal truth to which types of questions should you be asking. Sometimes a simple yes/no is in fact what you want.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_question

Great advice. Interrogative questioning was my biggest takeaway from my high school journalism class. We would often have to write interrogative-style fake interviews at the beginning of class and it took a while to develop an intuition for it.

But probably don’t start your interrogative sentence with ‘Why don’t you just...?’ ;)

We talk about this a lot in k12 education (I teach at the high school level). It’s often immediately apparent how new/effective a teacher is by monitoring their question style.

Learning Columbo Technique was great advice I got.