“How was your weekend?” can be a kind question. But if you ask it mainly so you can tell people about your own amazing weekend, they notice, and they like you less for it.
Researchers Alison Wood Brooks and Michael Yeomans call this move “boomerasking”: posing a question, letting the other person answer, then answering it yourself. Like a boomerang, the question comes straight back to the person who threw it. Across a series of studies, boomeraskers came across as less sincere and less likable than people who simply shared the same news without the setup.
The paper was published online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General on January 9, 2025, and appears in its March 2025 issue.
Common, and believed to work
The authors describe three flavors. Ask-bragging follows the question with something positive, like a great vacation. Ask-complaining follows it with something negative, like a family funeral. Ask-sharing follows it with something neutral, like a weird dream.
The habit is everywhere. In a survey of 302 online participants, 92.6% could recall receiving a boomerask and 91.9% recalled doing it themselves. Over half of the remembered examples happened within the past week, most often between friends, coworkers and romantic partners.
The two sides remembered these exchanges differently. People who had boomerasked rated the conversation as more enjoyable and less irritating than those on the receiving end, and they overestimated how much their partner had enjoyed it.
People also think the tactic helps. In a second survey of 155 participants, about 83% predicted that leading with a question would leave a better impression than just sharing. Common reasons were that asking first feels more natural, lets the other person talk, and follows conversational norms.
Brags, complaints and first dates
The experiments said otherwise. Participants read party conversations in which an acquaintance either opened with news, such as a job offer from Google, or first asked “how is your job going?” and then delivered the same news. Ask-braggarts were liked less and seen as less sincere than plain braggarts, and the same held for complaints and for neutral news.
In one neutral-news study, sincerity ratings were 4.63 out of 7 for ask-sharers versus 5.76 for people who shared directly. In each case, lower perceived sincerity explained most of the drop in liking.
Dating did not escape the pattern. In a study of 304 people reading excerpts from a first date, a date who answered their own questions was rated less sincere and less likable. Willingness to accept a second date averaged 55.9 on a 100-point scale, against 70.9 for a date who shared the same things and asked the same questions without the boomerang structure.
Across cultures and in live talk
Lab studies with 253 students in Hong Kong and 385 adults in London found that boomeraskers were again seen as less likable and less sincere. In the Hong Kong sample, the penalty showed up for brags but not for complaints.
When participants watched a video of a conversation, the boomerasker’s interest in the other person’s answers was judged far more likely to be pretend: 69.6 out of 100 versus 46.7 for the direct communicator. The authors also recorded live conversations between pairs of people to observe the behavior as it happens.
The authors acknowledge that most of their studies relied on imagined or observed conversations rather than participants’ own behavior, which is why they added the live conversation study.
Their practical advice is simple. If you want to share something, share it. If you ask a question, follow up on the answer.
Study Details:
- Title: Boomerasking: Answering Your Own Questions
- Authors: Alison Wood Brooks, Michael Yeomans
- Journal: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 154, No. 3, pages 864-893
- Publication Date: January 9, 2025
- DOI: 10.1037/xge0001693