Are You Guilty of Boomerasking?

Have you heard of boomerasking? It’s when someone asks a question, not because they care to hear your response, but because they can’t wait to answer the question themselves.

This specific behavior was the focal point of a study by researchers from Harvard Business School and Imperial College London. Allison Wood Brooks and Michael Yeomans so thoroughly examined boomerasking that they were able to break it down into three sub-categories:

• “Ask-bragging” is when someone wants to know a little bit about you only so that they can top it and brag about themselves.
• “Ask-complaining” is when a question is asked for the sole purpose of the question asker dumping their story of a negative experience onto you.
• “Ask-sharing” is when someone asks a question followed by disclosing something neutral. The researchers say that the thing shared can often be a weird dream, a thing only the question asker would find interesting yet can’t wait to tell everyone.

What is Boomerasking?

The researchers say that some of the study’s participants felt that prefacing a long conversation about themselves with a question posed to another person made the conversation feel more balanced and made them seem more considerate.

As we are all painfully aware, it’s an act that lives in the intersection between wanting to feel included and not wanting to be too pushy about it. And it ends up backfiring. It ultimately comes off as being a selfish, passive-aggressive way of inserting yourself and your own perspective into conversations under the guise of selflessness.

Everybody knows you’re only asking these questions so you can offer your perspective because no one in your life is asking you these questions. What began as a seemingly earnest attempt to better understand another person ends up being just another conversation that’s dripping with insincerity.

The researchers say there are ways to counteract boomerasking’s inherent selfish cynicism. If you notice that you have some nasty boomerasking instincts, the researchers suggest asking questions that you cannot answer yourself.

It also probably helps to be an active listener who is reacting on the fly to the words and emotions of the speaker rather than being someone who’s clearly waiting for their turn to talk. It’s not that you shouldn’t talk about yourself and never disclose anything about your own thoughts and feelings; you just shouldn’t do it under the guise of being interested in someone else’s thoughts and feelings.

Then you’re just an asshole.