Harvard Business School researchers studied more than 2,000 real speed-dating conversations among 110 daters and found that people who kept turning the topic back to themselves, instead of asking even one follow-up question, were the ones routinely read as having weaker social skills.

You have probably assumed, at some point, that the way to come across well in a first conversation is to be interesting.

Have a few good stories ready. Speak with some confidence about your work, your opinions, your weekend. That assumption is not unreasonable, and it is also not what a large body of conversation research actually found.

The people who left the strongest impression were not the ones with the best stories. They were the ones who kept asking about the other person’s.

The study that watched thousands of real first conversations

A team of researchers based at Harvard Business School ran a series of studies on question-asking, and the largest of them was built around real speed dating. It followed 110 daters through round-robin sessions of four-minute conversations, producing over 2,000 conversations, then measured which conversational habits predicted how much a partner liked the person they had just met and wanted to see again. Nobody was told what the study was actually measuring. The daters just talked, the way people do.

Two other studies backed up the pattern outside a dating context: one following professionals through networking-style conversations, another asking online daters to trade messages back and forth. Across all three settings, the same variable kept predicting the same outcome, which is part of why the finding has held up as more than a one-off curiosity from a single speed-dating night.

The habit that mattered more than being interesting

The single strongest predictor of being liked was not wit, not confidence, not having led an unusually interesting life. It was how many questions a person asked, and specifically how many of those were follow-up questions, the kind that respond to something the other person just said rather than a scripted item off a list.

As the researchers behind the work put it, Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks explained, “compared to those who do not ask many questions, people who do are better liked and learn more information from their conversation partners.”

People who spent most of their four minutes talking about themselves, meanwhile, tended to be read as less responsive and less genuinely interested in the person across the table, even when their stories were objectively good ones. That reading did not require the listener to consciously notice or name what was happening. It showed up in how much they said they liked the conversation and whether they wanted to trade contact information afterward, which is a fairly blunt way of saying whether the other person came across as someone worth talking to again.

Why this cuts against how most people actually prepare for a conversation

Most advice about making a good impression points a person inward: sharpen your stories, know your opinions, have something ready to say. The habit that this research keeps finding instead points outward. It costs nothing to prepare and does not depend on anyone having had an especially eventful month. Anyone can ask what happened next, or why someone decided to do something a certain way, or what that was actually like.

There is a real failure mode on the other side of this, and Brooks was careful to flag it rather than pretend curiosity is a free pass. she noted that “asking a barrage of questions without disclosing information about yourself may come across as guarded, or worse, invasive.”

A rapid string of questions with nothing offered back reads less like curiosity and more like an interview. The daters who did best were not silent interrogators. They talked plenty. They just kept steering the conversation back toward the other person often enough that it never became a monologue.

Why it has to be a follow-up, not just any question

A separate line of work by much of the same research team dug into why the effect works the way it does, and the distinction turned out to matter. Asking questions in general helps a little. Asking follow-up questions, the kind that build directly on something the other person just said rather than opening a new, unrelated topic, helps considerably more.

In a 2019 paper extending the original research, the authors concluded that “asking more questions in conversation, especially follow-up questions (that indicate responsiveness to a partner), increases interpersonal liking of the question asker.”

The word doing the real work there is responsiveness. A generic question, the kind anyone could ask of anyone, mostly signals politeness. A follow-up question proves that a person was actually listening to the specific answer they just received, closely enough to have something to ask about it. That is a much harder thing to fake, and it is likely why it reads as more meaningful than question-asking in general.

The part that most people underestimate

What makes this finding worth repeating is not just the direction of the effect but how much people misjudge it going in. When researchers asked participants beforehand to predict what would make them likable, almost nobody guessed that question-asking would matter this much. Most expected their content, the substance of what they said about themselves, to carry the conversation. It turned out to be a smaller factor than how much curiosity they showed about the person across from them.

None of this requires becoming a different kind of person at a dinner table or a first date. It requires noticing, a little more often than usual, that the sentence someone just said had a follow-up question sitting inside it, and asking it instead of waiting for a gap to talk about yourself. The stories people prepare in advance rarely go to waste either. They just tend to land better a few exchanges later, once the other person feels like the conversation is actually about both of them and not a performance they happened to be watching.