KNOW SOMEONE GUILTY OF BOOMERASKING?

Does this scenario sound familiar? A colleague approaches and asks, “Hey, what are you up to this weekend?” You tell her you’re not sure, but nothing big. She replies with her own vivid plans. “I’m going to my lake house, and we’re having a massive bonfire,” or “I’m going to a medieval fair to use the trebuchet I made.”

What seemed like a genuine expression of interest in you suddenly shifts and becomes a chance for your colleague to brag, complain or simply share about herself. I call this tactic “boomerasking,” and it happens constantly.

Like the looping arc of a boomerang, boomeraskers ask a question, let their counterpart answer and then immediately bring the focus of the conversation back to themselves. They try to achieve two conflicting goals at once: to show interest in their partner and to disclose something about themselves. But they fall short of achieving either goal.

During conversation, we can show interest in our partners in many ways—by asking questions, acknowledging or affirming a disparate viewpoint, validating their emotions (even if you go on to disagree with them), or saying something that responds to a partner’s previous utterance. We intuitively know that these behaviors are good—we’ve all been on the grateful receiving end of them.

But egocentrism is tricky to outrun. As humans, we focus persistently on our own perspective, a trait that helps us survive but also undermines our dealings with others.

Between 40% and 60% of conversational utterances are ego-related, focusing on our own feelings, opinions, and personal experiences. This self-centered conversational tendency is even more pronounced on social media, where some 80% of communication focuses on the self.

For many people, self-disclosure simply feels great. Sharing information about ourselves is undergirded by the same brain regions that respond to rewards like good food and attractive faces. A willingness to share about yourself is an important signal of liking and closeness: It shows that you trust someone to know things about you.

It’s also the primary way people shape others’ impressions of them. Through well-curated self-disclosure, we try to seem smart, confident, kind and interesting in the eyes of our partners (and anyone else who might be nearby). And we engage in behaviors like bragging and complaining to elicit preferred reactions like admiration and sympathy.

Still, most of us are sensitive to the fact that we can’t just walk around bragging and complaining and talking about ourselves all the time. We recognize that the norms of conversation prohibit blatantly egocentric behavior and that conversation should involve some give-and-take.

We attempt to solve this conundrum with a constellation of indirect habits. Talkers looking to elicit admiration might humblebrag, couching self-promotion in a complaint (“My hand hurts from signing so many autographs”). Talkers who want to seem well-connected but don’t want to say so explicitly might choose to name-drop (“I was having dinner with Zuck over the weekend”). And talkers who want to seem higher status than their partner, but don’t want to brag directly, might give a backhanded compliment (“Your ideas were pretty good, for an intern”).

But among all the subtle and obvious ways we attempt to mask our self-centeredness, boomerasking might be the worst—because it undermines the amazing benefits that come from asking questions.

Asking sincere questions, listening to others’ answers and following up on those answers may be the easiest and most powerful pathway to shared understanding and interpersonal connection. Boomerasking ruins the magic. Failing to follow up on your partner’s answer, and answering the question yourself instead, makes others feel like you don’t care about them—and probably didn’t care about them when you asked the question to begin with.

So don’t boomerask! While sharing about yourself feels good and can bring us closer, when another person shares their perspective, focus on them. We should all aim to be more interested in our partners before we go back to proving how interesting we are ourselves.