Prior research suggests that asking more questions improves outcomes in cooperative conversations, and a vast wisdom literature espouses the power of asking questions during conflictual conversations, too: negotiation experts suggest that questions invite counterparts to disclose information and, in doing so, put askers at an informational advantage. But is this advice necessary—and is it effective? We analyzed 61,057 speech turns from transcripts of 309 dyadic integrative negotiations and used natural language processing to estimate how often people ask questions, what types of questions they ask, and how well question-asking predicts personal goal attainment (Study 1; n = 618 MBA students). Open-ended questions were rare, occurring about once every four minutes (8% of turns). Yet, asking more open-ended questions was robustly associated with personal goal attainment. Closed-ended questions and non-question statements were not reliably related to goal attainment. We then tested causality in live chat negotiations: participants who were instructed to ask open-ended questions achieved higher personal gains than those instructed to ask closed-ended questions or to only make statements (Study 2; n = 1,452 online participants), and those instructed to prepare open-ended questions before their interactions outperformed those instructed to prepare statements (Study 3; n = 372 online participants). In all studies, the benefits of open-ended questions were tied to increased information elicitation and greater value creation. Collectively, these findings offer empirical support for the widely accepted—but rarely tested—claim that negotiators (and conversationalists broadly) focus excessively on influencing (by making statements) at the expense of learning (by asking questions).
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