Humans
New World’s oldest dog may have been dinner, plus worrisome PTSD and artful dodging in this week’s news
By Science News
Scoring with evasive answers
Deftly dodging questions pays off — just ask successful politicians. That’s because people often don’t notice when someone avoids a question by talking about a similar topic, say Harvard psychologists Todd Rogers and Michael Norton. Listeners focus more on whether they like a speaker than on the content of a response, the researchers find. Detection of question dodging shoots up when listeners are told to pay attention to the relevance of a videotaped speaker’s answers to questions or if queries are displayed on-screen during answers, the researchers report in an upcoming
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied
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