Why do we ask questions when we don't really care about the answer? What information can you glean from polite questions? Wouldn't it be better if we just asked direct questions?

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Telmway Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing why we ask how much a newborn baby weighs. So Chris, why do we ask how much a newborn baby weighs?

Well, I was given to ask myself the same question when a sort of acquaintance of mine recently had a baby and I was sort of at a bit of a loss, not necessarily terribly fascinated by their lives and so I was thinking about what to ask and social convention prompted me to say, so how much did the baby weigh? And they told me that it was nearly nine pounds I think and I actually found that to be quite useful information in some way. So I sort of asked this question automatically but actually I got quite a lot out of the answer. Nine pounds is a relatively healthy, well a pretty healthy weight. It sort of suggests a quite large baby so perhaps the labour was more difficult than for a smaller baby so the mother may be needing longer to recover and so on and so forth. So I essentially started querying why we ask questions like that that aren't sort of directly probing what we're interested in, i.e. is the baby okay? There's a bit of a taboo to sort of say, you know, is the baby okay and is the mother okay? So these kind of proxy questions come in quite useful. So I started thinking about the value of indirect questions. Okay, are there any other areas that

we can immediately think about where we're using indirect questions like this? I hope so. Yeah,

well one that comes to mind is the issue of, for example, how much somebody earns. So, you know, we rarely ask people flat out directly how much do you earn and yet it's something which is kind of, you know, an interesting bit of information to us and can be useful if we're trying to sell someone something or whatever it might be. And so, you know, we might ask all sorts of proxy kind of questions to get to the point. So things like, you know, where do you live, what do you do? These kinds of questions, you know, maybe they'll lead to other interesting conversation items but essentially, particularly in, you know, repressed British society,

we ask things in a kind of roundabout way. Yeah, so I mean, is this a British thing I'm wondering? And apparently in Britain, if you go to a party, you're not meant to ask what someone does for a living, you're not meant to ask their job apparently. Who decided that? Yeah, I don't know because I just read this in a book somewhere that apparently the British don't do that and you kind of have to kind of feel your way there and go, oh, do you have five to go to work each day or do you work in an office? And it turns into 20 questions or something, which was news to me because I tend to just, I don't think it's too socially taboo to say what's your job.

A friend of mine who after university basically spent a few years bumming around, he used to get really frustrated by that question and he would immediately take against anybody who asked that question because the answer was not much.

Well, he doesn't have to be doing a job though. I mean, if he literally has nothing to say, then he's probably pretty boring. So that's already conveying quite useful information.

He used to tell everybody he was a pilot.

Is that totally and utterly untrue? It's totally and utterly untrue. He sounds like a psychopath or something, this guy. See, I mean, that's the thing.

He didn't tell everyone he was a serial killer, of course.

There is value actually in questions which are going to be 99% of the time you're going to get a stock answer. If that 1% of the time when someone doesn't answer properly or does something unexpected or is evasive about it, you're actually learning something quite interesting. You know, if someone is refusing to tell me what they do, I'm going to assume they probably either don't do anything or do something really boring.

Or they're a spy.

No, because that's the point. A spy is going to have a really good answer to that. But someone who wants you to think they're a spy but isn't is going to be all evasive about what they do. So yeah, I mean, I think you can glean. Obviously, there are lots of questions that you can glean incidental information from. It's almost impossible to not give away some information and not even just about the content of what you say. You know, it's the way you say it and the accent you have and those sorts of things. But I question whether or not actually this is about information primarily. It seems to me that when we're asking about a baby's weight, I don't think I even know what to do with that information particularly. I think if it's extreme, if the baby is tiny or huge, maybe that will prompt further discussion. But in general, the information will just go into one ear and come out the other for me. I mean, and so I think the purpose of this kind of conversation is actually more social. It's just about social bonding. I think we've mentioned Kate Fox before. She's an anthropologist who wrote about, who's written a few books about the English. And she says, you know, a lot of commentators say, you know, why are the English so interested in people in the weather? Why do they all get together and talk about the weather? And she said, well, it's not actually nothing to do with being interested in the weather at all. What it is, is a social bonding ritual where, you know, we talk about something which is completely uncontroversial, so that we can agree with each other about something. And it doesn't matter what it is. And for me, the one that I'm sort of think of, because I'm alienated from it, is sport talk. So when people get together and start having these, what look, you know, from the outside perspective, completely meaningless sort of circular conversations about, you know, different football teams and who's won and who's lost and who's doing well and how stupid the manager is and those sorts of things. I have no idea what they're talking about. But it looks to me very like discussion about the weather in that it really isn't. They're not trying to convey information to one another. They're just trying to agree with each other about something. And I think the advantage of having these sorts of topics is that they allow us to do social bonding using words without, and at the same time, avoiding anything controversial. And I think that's the

key and interesting thing, though, the avoidance of controversy in these questions, you know, they're non-contentious questions. But yet, I don't think it is purely about social bonding. You are sort of effectively sounding people out in a conversation. So when people are talking about football, they're probably making some judgments about people. So, you know, for anybody with, you know, some awareness of football, if somebody says, I'm a Manchester United fan, that immediately tells you something about that, that individual. And does it does it?

Well, I think you then have to cross reference with the extent to which they're actually a Mancunian. Yes, because if I know, I know a Manchester United fan from Manchester, who's really annoyed about the fact that people think if you're from Manchester, you don't support Man United, because in Manchester, there's two teams and it's roughly 50 50, as I understand it. And yet, because Manchester United have this fabulous PR campaign in the in the 80s and 90s, you know, they have a very widespread international support base. And so that, you know, people, people assume that you're probably not authentic, I would assume that the inference people make is, oh, you're only saying you're a football fan. You're not really because Manchester United are what you support if you don't know anything about football.

Well, but also sort of about somebody's personality. So their their attraction towards, you know, effectively being being basic in in in kids speak, you know, their attraction towards the most popular item, but but it's more just generally the way you can have conversations or ask questions and determine lots, lots of things which superficially to others, they might they might not, not pick up pick up on. Yeah, I think that's a fair point. Because I think, you know,

going back to the original example of asking someone about their baby and how much it weighs, yes, there is definitely an element of social convention about that. But it's also kind of, as Nick said, the unless it's sort of town sounds really tiny or really huge. It is also a kind of a shorthand conversation to say, you know, is everything all right? And so if they say, you know, is one kilo, or two pounds, or if it was, you know, over 10 pounds, then there's a conversation right there. And if you're sort of dealing in the same currency, yeah, you'll be able to have a sort of a further chat about that. So I think it's an element of

both. It reminds me a bit of sort of repressive regimes where, you know, art may sort of be principally about or nominally about, you know, a particular non controversial issue, but actually there's this sort of hidden criticism or conversations might occur, you know, nobody wants to badmouth the regime publicly. But there are ways of doing that, you know, if you if you say, you know, oh, yes, they're a very enthusiastic party member or something that can't be taken as criticism of them. But to those in a particular cat, you know, they'll read between the lines. And it's that reading between the lines, which I think is a really valuable analytical skill.

And I think what interests me is, is whether this is something that if there's anything peculiarly British that we're good at doing that or not. On a slight sort of offshoot, I don't know if this is the same thing. But a number of years ago, I was on holiday in the Caribbean. And I'd spend all holiday, mainly with Americans meeting new Americans. And I just found it utterly exhausting. Because within the first five minutes of meeting someone, I knew huge amounts of information about them. I knew about, you know, where they lived, I probably knew how much they earned. So I certainly knew their job. I knew about their family. I knew about their ground. I just knew so much information. When I first went to the US

well, the thing is, for me, I didn't mind all this exchange. But I was just exhausted by it after a week or so. And then what happened there happened to be one day I was on a on a launch on a boat launch going there was a sort of a five minute journey. Do you mean that they were launching a boat? No, it was a launch, which is a kind of boat, is it? Okay, yeah. And I found myself sitting next to this little old lady, this sweet little old lady who turned out to be English. And we sat and we chatted for five minutes, the length of the journey. And I have no idea what we chatted about other than that, at the end of that conversation, neither of us knew anything about the other. But we'd had a perfectly nice chat, though. I didn't know her name. I didn't know where she came from. And I just found it so refreshing, you know. And, yeah, I don't know.

You've got all the all the all the benefit of social interaction and social grooming, without without having to give away any potentially harmful information. Yeah, but also, I mean,

I suppose, you know, obviously, the more direct communication style is, is, is probably more efficient, you know, you got all that information passed over in a short period of time. But like you say, it's quite cognitively exhausting. But in, in reality, often, you know, the world around us is not, you know, the the workings of it are not immediately apparent, you know, there are all sorts of questions, which, which are important to know the answer to, which you can't, you can't just see all the information there. And so I think there is something about having the ability to look at, look at proxies and determine things, you know, if you want to know something like how, you know, how much plutonium has North Korea got, they're not going to tell you in a five minute conversation at the airport. But, you know, there are only certain things you might be able to find out, you know, bits of information related to it, which will help you, you know, generate an estimate of how much plutonium they've got. And I think that ability to be used to sort of, you know, receiving bits of information and not accepting the face value and thinking, wait a minute, what does, what does that mean? And if I stitch it together with this other bit of information, what, what do those two things mean together? I think that, to me is, you know, the the essence of analysis.

I think, unfortunately, we have to stop in a moment. But I think we're just actually getting towards an interesting part of the discussion and the different directions we could have gone in, gone in from here. I think one of the things that interests me is, for example, bringing you out to analysis and, and also thinking about policymaking, and especially foreign policy. I'm just intrigued as to how some of the different cultures we've talked about, well, we've only talked about two really, which is the US and UK. I'm just interested in how those cultures might or the governments of those countries might approach international affairs and dealings with other countries. So for example, with, let's say with the Russians, just being sort of famously slightly sort of, I think with the Russians, I think it's,

you know, the Russian cultures is really, it sort of takes the sort of British level of cynicism, cranks it up to a maximum, and the sort of cynical worldview, which says, well, everyone is out for themselves. And, you know, we're just more honest about it than other countries. You know, and it's ultimately it's a zero sum game. You know, you claim that it's all about, you know, you the West claim that you're all about, you know, human rights and democracy and stuff. But actually, really, that's just your way to gain influence at our expense.

I mean, the downside of indirect communication in the sort of context of Russia is, if you look at British military direction in the Crimea campaign, the reason the charge of the Light Brigade happened was because somebody sort of didn't directly say what they wanted to sort of that hill over there somewhere to go and do something over there. And look what that resulted in.

So we'll have to stop there. And I like the way, you know, as always on Aleph, we never know quite where it's going to go with the Cognitive Engineering podcast from starting out with baby's weights through to the charge of the Light Brigade. I leave you to draw conclusions you can from that. So thank you very much. I'm Fraser McGruer. I've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. Thank you for listening. And until next time, goodbye.