Better Than Lying

In a job interview, applicants might be asked difficult personal questions: Do you have other offers? When do you plan on having children? Sometimes, the safest bet may be to deflect the question by posing one’s own.

In several experiments, participants were tasked with selling a painting. They needed to learn whether the buyers owned other pieces in the collection, which would make the new painting more valuable. The sellers viewed the buyers more favorably when they deflected the seller’s key question than when the buyers declined to answer. And the sellers sold the painting at a slightly lower cost when the buyers deflected instead of answering honestly.

The same approach could apply to an interview or other high-stakes setting, says author Brad Bitterly, a researcher at the University of Michigan. When deploying the strategy, Bitterly advises, just make sure that the new question is relevant to the original. “The power of deflection is that it provides you with an opportunity to shift the conversation to the other person.”