The Trap of the Leading Question
Launch library · evergreen read
A leading question smuggles its own answer into the way it is phrased. Asking, did that upset you, rather than, how did that make you feel, quietly narrows the range of honest replies available to the person being asked.
The trap is easy to fall into because leading questions often feel more efficient. They seem to save time by skipping straight to the likely answer. What they actually do is contaminate the answer, making it reflect the asker's assumptions as much as the responder's real experience.
Avoiding the trap takes a small discipline: phrasing a question so that any answer, including one that contradicts your expectation, would sound natural in reply. If only one answer fits comfortably, the question was probably leading before it was even finished.
Journalists, researchers, and therapists are trained to catch this pattern in their own speech, because it is remarkably easy to fall into without noticing. A useful habit is reading a question back silently before asking it, checking whether the answer was already hiding inside the words.