Chapter 8 - Questioning In Your Personal Life
Interrogation skills can be helpful in everyday life, even in non-commercial interactions. In a practical sense, interrogation gives you a better understanding of others. In a social sense, asking people questions is a way of making social connections, "getting to know" people without a specific purpose in mind.
Parenting and Questions
(EN: This entire section is a ramble that doesn't seem to come to a clear point. Examples are provided of the way in which parents ask questions of children, the way in which young children are inquisitive about everything, and the way in which a parent can ask a question rather than giving an order. There's no central theme or structure.)
Social Questioning
Social questioning can be a more complaisant method of having a trivial conversation with a stranger. Rather than tell them things about yourself, ask about them. Asking questions, and showing a genuine interest in learning about what the other person has to say, is necessary to having a conversation - as opposed to two people who take turns exchanging trivia with one another.
Additionally, questioning is useful in determining whether the other party has any interest in having a conversation with you. He proposes a "five-minute rule" that suggests if a person doesn't ask a question in five minutes, they're not really interested in listening to what you have to say, so you should bring the conversation to a close and seek another partner.
Dating and Questioning
As a social ritual, dating is primarily geared toward information exchange. Each person wishes to learn about the other, and wishes to provide information about themselves, to determine if there is a potential for a long-term relationship.
The five-minute rule above applies, though the author suggests stretching it to 10 minutes, given that dating is a high-anxiety situation for most people. But again, if they do not ask a question within ten minutes, they're not really interested in you or what you have to say.
There is a careful balance to be struck between talking too much about yourself and not saying enough. A date who acts like an interrogator, firing of questions about the other person while offering nothing about themselves, is likely looking to assess their interest in you without considering, or caring, if you are particularly interested in them.
As in any social interaction, the interrogation is about finding common interests - if there is nothing that both parties are interested in doing, then there's nothing for them to do together. Or if one party is strongly interested in something the other is not, this signals incompatibility.
Personal Questions and Personality
(EN: This is another wreck of a section, in which the author speaks about the Myers-Briggs personality profile in a superficial way and concludes without making much of a point.)
Questioning To Know Yourself Better
Asking questions of yourself is worthwhile, just to know yourself better: we often act on impulse without pausing to consider the reasons or what we're trying to accomplish.
From there, an odd bit about the way in which he has done a lot of role-playing for his classes, playing the part of a foreign soldier, terrorist, drug courier, and other nefarious characters. What he noticed is that the kinds of questions his students would ask would help him to identify his role, considering what the motivation of a person in such a role might be.
An interesting notion is that people discover a lot about themselves when being questioned by others, and discover things about their own personality, goals, ethics, and values.
What kinds of questions would you ask another person to determine whether they are likable? How would you answer those questions if someone else put them to you? What you discover might be surprising.