Question order changes answers: what you ask first shapes the flow

What you ask before "Are you happy?" changes the answer

There's a famous psychology experiment. College students are asked two questions: "Have you been on a date recently?" and "Are you happy?" Just swapping the order of these two questions made a big difference in how people answered "Are you happy?"

When "Are you happy?" comes first, people answer by weighing their life as a whole. But when "Have you been on a date recently?" comes first, they answer "Are you happy?" with romance already on their mind. People who had been on a date tend to say they're happy, and people who hadn't tend to say they're not.

The order of questions ends up steering the answer to the next question. This is called the "order effect." When designing surveys, researchers take this effect into account and decide the order of questions carefully.

The first question becomes an "anchor"

Behind the order effect is a psychological phenomenon called "anchoring." The first piece of information you're shown becomes an "anchor" and influences the judgments you make afterward.

In an experiment reported by Tversky and Kahneman in 1974, participants were asked, "Is the percentage of African countries in the United Nations higher or lower than 65%?" and then, "So what percentage do you think it is?" The median answer was 45%. When the first question was changed to "higher or lower than 10%?", the median answer dropped to 25%. The number shown first (65% or 10%) acted as an anchor and pulled the guesses toward it.

The same effect works in a question box. When you have several questions waiting, the question you answer first changes the tone of the answers that follow. If you start with fun questions, your later answers tend to be upbeat too. If you start with heavy questions, the whole set tends to turn serious. Your first answer becomes the "anchor" for that day's entire Q&A.

Setting a theme for your question box creates an order effect

If you set a theme like "Today I'm answering questions about love," most of the questions you get will be about love. That's obvious, right? But the interesting part comes next.

Say that on a day with the theme "love," you get a question that has nothing to do with it ("Any movies you'd recommend?"). Without realizing it, the person answering tends to pick movies with love in mind. Romance movies like "La La Land" or "We Made a Beautiful Bouquet" (a Japanese romance film) come to mind more easily. If the same question came in on a day with no theme, they might name completely different movies, like "Interstellar" or "The Dark Knight."

This happens because the theme works as "priming." Priming is when an earlier stimulus influences a later judgment. The theme "love" acts as the earlier stimulus and nudges your thinking toward romance.

A question box theme doesn't just narrow down the kinds of questions you get. It also influences the direction of your answers.

Be careful not to lead people

If the order of questions can sway the answers, that also means that, used the wrong way, it can "lead" someone's answer in the direction you intended.

For example, if you line up questions that draw out complaints before asking the main question, the other person becomes more likely to answer negatively. Doing this on purpose distorts how they really feel. You can't call that a fair exchange.

Use this effect not to manipulate others, but to notice whether you're unknowingly asking in a biased way. "Is the order of my questions pushing an answer on them?" People who can ask themselves that can draw out someone's true feelings without distorting them.

What changes once you know about this effect

Knowing about the order effect changes two things about how you run your question box.

First: you can think about the order in which you share your Q&As. When you share several Q&As, the first one you share shapes your followers' impression of your question box. Share a fun Q&A first, and it comes across as "a fun question box." Share a deep Q&A first, and it comes across as "a question box that makes you think."

Second: you can notice when your own answers are being affected by the order effect. If you feel like "My answers today are kind of gloomy overall," it might be because you started with heavy questions. By deliberately starting with light questions, you can adjust the tone of your answers as a whole.

The order effect is a psychological phenomenon that's hard to avoid completely, even when you're aware of it. But just knowing it exists lets you look back objectively at "why did my answers turn out this way?" Are your answers being influenced by the order of the questions? If you stop and think about it now and then, you might discover something new.