The Questions Nobody Asks Anymore

Someone asks how you’re doing. You say “good, you?” They say “good.” You both move on. The entire exchange takes about four seconds and communicates almost nothing. It’s a handshake made of words.

At some point, “how are you?” stopped being a question. It became a ritual greeting, a noise we make at the start of conversations to signal friendliness without requiring honesty. Communication researchers call these phatic expressions — language that serves a social function rather than an informational one. The words are there, but the curiosity behind them left a long time ago.

The strange part is that most of us notice this. We know the conversations we’re having with our friends are shallower than they used to be. We miss the long talks that went somewhere. We just don’t know how to get back to them.

The follow-up question problem

In 2017, a team of researchers at Harvard Business School published a study that isolated one conversational behavior as uniquely powerful in building connection: follow-up questions. Not the first question you ask, but what you do after someone answers it.

Across multiple experiments, people who asked more follow-up questions were consistently rated as more likable by their conversation partners. The researchers found that follow-up questions signal something specific: responsiveness. They tell the other person that you heard what they said, that it mattered to you, and that you want to know more. Karen Huang, the lead researcher, and her colleagues found that when people were told to ask more questions in conversation, they overwhelmingly generated follow-up questions. And those follow-ups drove nearly all of the boost in how much people liked them.

49% follow-ups

Follow-up questions (49%)

Full-switch questions (27%)

Mirror questions (19%)

Introductory questions (5%)

Huang et al., Harvard Business School (2017) — 368 conversations coded across Studies 1 & 2

When the researchers analyzed 368 conversations, they found that follow-up questions made up nearly half of all questions asked. And in a separate study analyzing nearly 2,000 speed dates, the single best predictor of whether someone wanted a second date wasn’t attractiveness or shared interests. It was the other person’s follow-up question rate.

This seems obvious in theory. Of course people want to feel heard. But the study revealed something less intuitive: most people don’t do this naturally. The default in conversation is to redirect to yourself. To hear someone’s answer and pivot to your own experience, your own story, your own opinion. We think we’re connecting by sharing. What actually connects is staying on their answer for one more beat.

The gap between small talk and real talk

There’s a related finding that goes back further. In the late 1990s, psychologist Arthur Aron designed an experiment at the State University of New York at Stony Brook to test whether strangers could develop genuine closeness in under an hour. He gave pairs of people a set of 36 questions, arranged in escalating levels of vulnerability. They started with “Would you like to be famous?” and ended with “When did you last cry in front of another person?”

The results were remarkable. After just 45 minutes, strangers who went through the structured questions reported a mean closeness score of 4.02 on a 7-point scale, comparable to the average relationship in participants’ lives. One pair from the study later married. The mechanism wasn’t magic. It was structured self-disclosure: asking something real, hearing the answer, and reciprocating with something equally honest.

What Aron demonstrated was that depth isn’t a personality trait. It’s a behavior. Most conversations stay shallow not because the people in them are shallow, but because nobody makes the first move toward honesty. We’re all standing at the edge of the pool waiting for someone else to jump in.

Why we stopped asking

If follow-up questions build connection and deeper questions create closeness, why do most of our conversations still feel like they’re circling the surface?

Part of it is time. The rush hour of adult life leaves less room for the kind of unstructured conversation where depth happens naturally. Americans used to spend about six and a half hours a week with friends. That number has been falling for a decade.

American Time Use Survey (BLS), Harvard Happiness Lab analysis

When you have forty-five minutes between picking up the kids and making dinner, the conversation defaults to logistics.

Part of it is fear. Real questions invite real answers, and real answers can be heavy. Asking a friend “how are you, honestly?” is an act of courage, because you might hear something that requires you to show up in a way that a thumbs-up emoji never will.

And part of it is practice. We’re out of shape. Years of group chats and reaction emojis and “haha that’s crazy” have atrophied the conversational muscles that deeper friendship requires. We’ve gotten very good at acknowledging each other and very bad at actually asking each other anything.

What one good question can do

The research consistently points in the same direction: the quality of a friendship has less to do with how often you see each other and more to do with what happens when you do. A weekly exchange that goes beneath the surface builds more closeness than a monthly dinner that stays on top of it.

This is something we think about a lot at Colloquies. The weekly prompts we send aren’t conversation starters in the icebreaker sense. They’re invitations to go one level deeper than you normally would, with the people who already matter to you.

But you don’t need an app for this. You need one person in your circle willing to ask a question that’s slightly too honest and sit with whatever comes back. The research says that person will be liked more, trusted more, and remembered more. Not because they were clever, but because they cared enough to stay curious.

The question underneath the question

We’ve built a culture that treats “how are you?” as a closed transaction. Ask, answer, move on. But every time we do that, we’re making a small choice about how much we want to know the people around us. Most of the time, the honest answer to “how are you?” is sitting right there, one follow-up question away.

The conversations we miss most aren’t the ones we forgot to have. They’re the ones that started and never went anywhere. Two people who genuinely like each other, trading pleasantries, waiting for the other one to go first.

Someone has to ask the real question. It might as well be you.