What color is your house?

After reading that question, what were you thinking about? The obvious respond is the color of your house. Though this practice may seem ordinary, it has profound implications. The question momentarily hijacked your thought procedure and focused information technology entirely on your firm or apartment. Yous didn't consciously tell your brain to think about that; it just did so automatically.

Questions are powerful. Not only does hearing a question touch on what our brains do in that instant, information technology can also shape our future behavior. And that tin be a powerful principle in the workplace.

Questions On The Mind

Questions trigger a mental reflex known equally "instinctive elaboration." When a question is posed, it takes over the brain'south thought process. And when your brain is thinking about the answer to a question, it can't contemplate anything else.

Research in neuroscience has found that the man encephalon can only think nearly one idea at a time. So when you enquire somebody a question, you lot force their minds to consider only your question. As neuroscientist John Medina puts it in his book Brain Rules, "Research shows that we can't multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously." Likewise, Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon has written that human beings consciously "operate largely in serial fashion. The more than demanding the job, the more we are single-minded."

Behavioral scientists take also institute that just request people most their future decisions significantly influences those decisions, a phenomenon known as the "mere measurement consequence." Back in 1993, social scientists Vicki Morwitz, Eric Johnson, and David Schmittlein conducted a study with more than 40,000 participants that revealed that but asking someone if people were going to buy a new car within six months increased their purchase rates by 35%.

Co-ordinate to an earlier study published in the Periodical of Applied Psychology, asking citizens whether they're going to vote in an upcoming election increases the likelihood that they will by 25%. And in yet another study, this one from 2008, researchers found that asking almost one's intention to requite claret raised donation rates by a modest but noteworthy viii.6%. The same upshot has been found in studies involving computer sales, exercise frequency, and disease prevention—in each instance, all these behaviors can be increased simply past asking almost them.

Inquiring Your Way To Influence

And then why exercise questions have such influence on the controlling process? First and foremost, they prompt the brain to contemplate a behavior, which increases the probability that it will be acted upon.

In fact, decades of research has found that the more the brain contemplates a behavior, the more likely information technology is that nosotros will engage in it. That's non all. Only thinking nearly doing something can shift your perception and even alter your body chemistry. For instance, imagine sipping some lemon juice. What does it sense of taste like? As you briefly call back about lemon juice, discover the sensations occurring in your mouth. Yous'll notice that something totally across your control occurred—you lot began to salivate more than and y'all could almost taste the tartness of the juice.

Want to employ this principle in the workplace to advance your career? Try information technology the side by side time you lot accept to give a presentation. call back back to the last ane you had to sit down through. Too often, presenters fall into the trap of talking at people, instead of engaging them. I like shooting fish in a barrel way to fix that habit is to add more questions into your talk.

If you're discussing a characteristic of the product your visitor offers, yous could enquire, "If you had this [feature], how would you use information technology?" You don't actually need to sit dorsum and wait for answers, though. The question guides your listener in mentally digesting how she might use the thing you're talking about–which actually increases the likelihood that she volition.

You lot can also use questions to gain an edge on a job interview. Simply don't stick to the typical inquiries. Research out of Harvard University suggests that you should ask the types of questions that get an interviewer to offer an opinion, not just supply data. When scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), they found that questions that asked participants to disembalm their opinions increased neural action in the areas of the brain associated with reward and pleasance.

As a upshot, a question like, "Based on what'due south happening in our industry, how do you see the visitor going later opportunities?" won't just demonstrate your expertise, it can subtly make an interviewer more receptive to y'all, but by virtue of eliciting their personal views.

Questions are so ingrained in human communication that it's piece of cake to underestimate their bear on on our brains. Yet science has proven that they're an effective tool for strengthening connections betwixt people and gaining influence. Which is pretty useful.

Don't you think?

This article is adapted from The Science of Selling: Proven Strategies to Make Your Pitch, Influence Decisions, and Close the Deal by David Hoffeld, published by TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a sectionalisation of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2016 past David Hoffeld. It is reprinted with permission.