Most of us prepare for a first conversation as though we were auditioning. We reach for the interesting anecdote, the well-timed observation, the line that will make us seem quick and worth knowing. The unspoken theory is that people are drawn in by what we say about ourselves. It is a reasonable theory. It is also, on the available evidence, mostly wrong, and the correction turns out to be more useful than any opening line.
The thing that reliably pulls another person in is not a performance at all. It is attention, offered in the plainest possible form: a question.
The finding that undoes the audition
In 2017 a team of researchers led by Karen Huang, with Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Julia Minson and Francesca Gino, published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology with the deadpan title It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask. Across several studies of real two-person conversations, they found a consistent pattern: the people who asked more questions were better liked by the person they were talking to.
One experiment made the point cleanly. Strangers were paired for a fifteen-minute chat, and one of each pair was quietly told to ask at least nine questions while the other was told to ask no more than four. Neither knew the other had different instructions. Afterwards, the high-question partners were rated as more likeable. The same effect showed up in a setting where liking has real stakes: in speed-dating conversations, people who asked more questions were more likely to be granted a second date.
The researchers put the mechanism down to something they called responsiveness, which is the sense that the other person is listening, understands you, and cares about what you are saying. A question is the most direct way to signal all three at once, which is why it works when a clever remark often does not. The remark shows you off. The question shows that the other person has your attention.
Why follow-up questions do the heavy lifting
Not all questions carried the same weight. When the team ran the conversations through a language-analysis tool, one type stood out: the follow-up question, the one that picks up a thread the other person has just offered and asks them to say more.
This makes sense once you see what a follow-up proves. Anyone can arrive with a list of questions and work through them like a form. A follow-up cannot be prepared, because it depends entirely on what the other person just said. It is evidence that you were actually listening, and it invites them to keep going on something they have already shown an interest in. That is a very different experience from being asked a fresh, unrelated question every thirty seconds, which can feel less like interest and more like an interview.
The study also found a limit worth remembering. Questions asked at the wrong moment, or ones that feel rude, intrusive or repetitive, do not buy any goodwill. The point is not to interrogate. It is to be genuinely curious about the person in front of you and to let that curiosity shape what you ask next.
The quiet catch about who is watching
There is a twist in the same research that is easy to miss and worth holding onto. When a separate group of people read transcripts of the conversations as outside observers, they preferred the partners who answered more questions, not the ones who asked them. The person telling the good story looked better from the outside.
So the effect is not a universal law of charisma. It is specific to the person being asked. We warm to someone who is responsive to us, in particular, and that warmth does not necessarily transfer to a bystander. For a conversation you are actually part of, though, that is precisely the point. You are not trying to impress the room. You are trying to connect with one person, and to that person, the questions land.
Going one layer below the weather
Questions get you started. Where they go matters too, and here a second line of research is quietly encouraging. Work by Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, published in the same journal in 2021, looked at what happens when strangers skip the small talk. Across a series of experiments with more than a thousand participants, people were asked to discuss either shallow topics, such as the weather or television, or deeper ones, such as a time they had cried in front of someone or what they felt most grateful for.
Before talking, participants expected the deeper conversations to be awkward. Afterwards, they reported the opposite. The deep conversations felt less awkward and more connecting than they had predicted, and left both people happier than the small talk did. The researchers traced the reluctance to a simple miscalculation: we assume the other person is less interested in a real conversation than they actually are, so we keep things safe and stay on the surface longer than either of us wants.
None of this argues for opening with your deepest wound. It suggests that a question with a little more substance, asked warmly once a conversation is under way, is usually more welcome than we fear. What did you make of that. What got you into this. What have you been thinking about lately. These are small steps below the weather, and people tend to meet you there.
What the evidence does and does not promise
A few honest limits belong here. These are studies of specific settings, mostly short conversations between strangers in Western samples, and liking measured in a laboratory is not the same as a friendship. Much of the evidence is correlational or drawn from single, if well-designed, studies, so it is better read as a reliable tendency than an iron rule. Context matters, culture shapes how forward a question can be, and a warm silence sometimes does more than any prompt.
What survives all those caveats is a modest and freeing idea. The opener that draws people in is rarely the thing you say about yourself. It is the attention you turn toward them, offered as a real question, followed by another that shows you heard the answer. The pressure to be interesting, it turns out, is mostly a pressure to be interested.