Been reading Daniel Kahneman’s excellent and very useful “Thinking, Fast and Slow”…
He says: If asked a difficult question we don’t know the answer to, we will normally pick an easier one we do have an answer to, and provide the answer to that one instead. And we do that without realising we’re making the substitution. It’s an unconscious process.
That rings true, I believe.
Moreover, it seems to me…
If the question asked requires a yes or no answer, then our search for a seemingly related question we can answer in those binary terms may take us an especially long way from the starting point, with unpredictable results.
Maybe we should take more care with our questions.