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So if asking why isn’t so helpful, what should we ask? A study by psychologists J. Gregory Hixon and William Swann arrived at a simple answer. The researchers told a group of undergraduates that two raters would evaluate their personality based on a test of “sociability, likeability and interestingness” they’d taken earlier in the semester, then they asked the students to judge the accuracy of their results. What the students didn’t know was that everyone’s results were the same: one rater gave a positive evaluation, while the other gave a negative one. But before making their accuracy judgments, some of the participants were given time to think about why they were the kind of person they were, and others were asked to think about what kind of person they were. The why students, it turned out, were resistant to the negative evaluation. As the paper’s authors muse: “Presumably, participants who focused on why used their reflection time to rationalize, justify and explain away the negative information.” The what students, on the other hand, were more receptive to the same data and to the notion that it could help them understand themselves. The lesson here: Asking what could keep us open to discovering new information about ourselves, even if that information is negative or in conflict with our existing beliefs. Asking why might have the opposite effect.— Unknown
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