Conversational blindness

Todd Rogers

What happens when people try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? Two experiments demonstrated conversational blindness—listeners' surprising failure to notice such dodges—and explored the interpersonal consequences of this phenomenon. Listeners viewed successful question-dodgers as positively as speakers who actually answered the question they are asked, but were not blind to all efforts to dodge: They both noticed—and punished—particularly egregious attempts (Study 1). More troublingly, listeners preferred speakers who answered the wrong question well over those who answered the right question poorly (Study 2).