Why There’s No Such Thing as "Just Asking Questions"
In one episode of the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation, our protagonist, Leslie Knope, becomes embroiled in a political scandal when her efforts to secure funding for her governmental department result in the imminent closure of a local animal shelter, imperiling its resident cats and dogs. Wasting no time, one of Leslie’s political opponents (played by the delightful Kathryn Hahn) appears on local TV for comment.
“I’m not saying Leslie Knope is a dog murderer, per se,” Hahn’s character says smilingly. “I just think her actions raise some questions. Like, for example, is she a dog murderer?”
“Well, I don’t know the answer to that, Jennifer,” says the show’s host gravely, “But your tone makes me think, yes.”
This absurd scene is, of course, fictional. But in the real world, you may have had the displeasure of overhearing some similarly cynical questions: “Do vaccines really work?” “Aren’t there any alternative treatments?” “Shouldn’t we just let COVID do its thing?”
Sometimes, questions like these are sincere, and our job as behavioral scientists is to answer and navigate them in earnest. Other times, however, they are used to sow misinformation and distrust among the general public. In these cases, our job as behavioral scientists is instead to figure out how to stop bad questions from inferring with good policymaking.
To do that, though, we need to figure out why questions can be misleading in the first place. Thankfully, there is already quite a bit of work, in psychology, linguistics, and philosophy, that can help us understand why questions can lead us astray.
References
- Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211(4481), 453–458. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7455683.
- Owens, B. (2018). Replication failures in psychology not due to differences in study populations. Nature, d41586-018-07474-y. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07474-y
- Keren, G. (Ed.). (2011). Perspectives on framing. Psychology Press.
- Pew Research Center. (n.d.). Writing Survey Questions. https://www.pewresearch.org/our-methods/u-s-surveys/writing-survey-questions/
- Cross, Charles and Floris Roelofsen, “Questions”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/questions/>
- Fleisher, N. (2021, October 15). Can He Do That? Thinking C21. https://www.c21uwm.com/2020/10/15/can-he-do-that/
- Portner, P. (2004). The Semantics of Imperatives within a Theory of Clause Types. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 14, 235. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v14i0.2907
- Robertson, E. (2013). The Epistemic Value of Diversity: The Epistemic Value of Diversity. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 47(2), 299–310. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12026
- Eswarman, V. (2019, April 29). The Buisness Case for Diversity in the Workplace Is Now Overwhelming. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/business-case-for-diversity-in-the-workplace/#:~:text=There%20is%20substantial%20research%20to,and%20better%20problem%2Dsolving%20abilities
- Williamson, T. (1996). Knowing and Asserting. The Philosophical Review, 105(4), 489. https://doi.org/10.2307/2998423
- Whitcomb, D. (2017). One Kind of Asking. The Philosophical Quarterly, 67(266), 148–168. https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqw027
- Shearer, E., & Mitchell, A. (2021, January 12). News use across social media platforms in 2020. Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2021/01/12/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-in-2020/
About the Author
Juan Ignacio Murillo
Juan is a Summer Associate at The Decision Lab. He recently graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy and linguistics, and is currently pursuing an MA in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is passionate about integrating and applying traditional philosophical thinking—especially in metaethics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science—to empirical research and problems in everyday life. Currently, he is interested in what values are, and how they feature in what we say and how we think. He is also interested in how understanding the role values play in our lives may help us deal with broader societal issues, such as vaccine hesitancy.
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