Good questions to ask someone you just met

Almost every list of questions to ask a stranger has the same problem: the questions are fine, and they don't help, because the difficulty was never coming up with a question. It was what to do with the answer.

So here is the one finding worth building on, and then the questions.

Follow-up questions do the work

Researchers looked at real conversations — online chats between strangers, and face-to-face speed dates — and counted questions. People who asked more of them were better liked by the person they were talking to. That much you might guess.

The part you would not guess is which questions. The effect ran through follow-up questions specifically: the ones that pick up what the other person just said and ask for more of it. Not opening questions, not questions that switch topic, not the interesting ones you thought of in advance. In the speed-dating data, people who asked more follow-up questions were more likely to be asked on a second date — a fairly unambiguous signal.

And in a study where people were told how many questions to ask, the instruction that produced the effect was to ask at least nine over the course of a conversation. The comparison group was told to ask at most four. Four is roughly what people do by default.

What a follow-up looks like

The move is small enough to write down. They say something. Instead of answering with your own version of it, or moving to your next topic, you ask about theirs.

• "You said you'd just moved — what made you go?"
• "What's the bit of that you actually like?"
• "How long have you been doing that?"
• "Was that always the plan, or did it just happen?"
• "What's the worst part of it?"
• "You said it was fine — is fine good or is fine bad?"
• "What would you be doing instead?"
• "How did you end up in that?"
• "Is that normal, or was that a strange one?"
• "What did you make of that?"

None of these are clever, and that's deliberate. Most of them work after almost any sentence anybody says. You do not need a repertoire; you need to be willing to spend a turn on their answer instead of your next remark.

Openers, since you came here for a list

If you also want somewhere to start, these are the ones that leave room for a follow-up rather than closing on a single word:

• "What's your day been like?"
• "What are you avoiding right now?"
• "What's the last thing that genuinely annoyed you?"
• "What's something you've changed your mind about?"
• "What are you supposed to be doing instead of this?"

Each one is only useful because of what you do next. Ask the second question about their answer and the conversation is running; move to the next item on the list and you're conducting a survey.

Two honest limits

First, this is about being liked, not about the conversation being good for you. Someone who asks all the questions and answers none is well liked and has told nobody anything. If that is already your habit — and it often is, for people who find this hard — the useful direction is probably answering more, not asking more.

Second, "at least nine" was an instruction in an experiment, not a target. Counting your own questions mid-conversation is a reliable way to have a worse one. Take it as evidence that the natural rate is too low, not as a quota.