How do we get to know someone - Diagnostic questions for inferring personal traits

Sep 4, 2026

Uploaded by Grenda

When first meeting somebody, conversations face the challenge of “getting to know them” through the choice of questions. Across two experiments, participants rated a large set of conversational questions that varied along a latent interpersonal depth continuum from “small talk” to “deep” questions. In a second study, responses to deeper questions supported more accurate personality inferences. Results indicate that free responses contain sufficient information for social inference and that people have reliable intuitions about which topics enable learning and connection.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages7

Reading Time18 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Interpersonal depth and diagnostic value of questions

Measuring personality and diagnostic items

Everyday conversation as intuitive personality psychology

Experimental approach

Experiment 1: Evaluating question depth

Experiment 2: Linking written responses to personality scales

How do we get to know someone? Diagnostic questions for inferring personal traits Erik Brockbank* , Tobias Gerstenberg, Judith E. Fan, & Robert D. Hawkins Department of Psychology, Stanford University, USA * [ebrockbank@stanford.edu](ebrockbank@stanford.edu) Abstract When first meeting somebody, we’re faced with the challenge of “getting to know them.” Why do some questions seem to enable this better than others? In Experiment 1, participants (N = 185) evaluated a large bank of conversational questions. We found that questions varied along a reliable latent dimension of interpersonal depth ranging from “small talk” to “deep”questions. In Experiment 2 (N = 188), participants answered a subset of these questions along with a number of self-report personality scales. Using a language model to estimate how informative participants’ free responses were, we find that individualized personality predictions were more accurate when incorporating free responses; furthermore, responses to deeper questions supported more accurate personality inferences than small talk. Taken together, results suggest not only that responses contained the statistical information necessary to make abstract social inferences, but also that people have accurate intuitions about which conversational topics enable learning about and connecting with others. Keywords: social learning; personality; question asking; closeness; language models Introduction Starting from a young age, humans learn the dance of meeting someone new, whether it’s a colleague, a classmate, orthe person next to you on a flight. An observer of these exchanges might notice that they typically involve some questions (“Where are you from?”) more than others (“How many toes do you have?”) . While these conversations respect a range of norms and situational constraints,“getting to know somebody” includes epistemic goals—towards this end, some questions are more useful for learning what others are like. What kinds of questions help us get to know others, and what information about a speaker do the answers contain? In the current work, we measure the diagnostic value of different questions for learning what others are like. In fact, this problem is familiar to psychologists interested in identifying stable differences between people. Prominent theories of human personality propose succinct axes that account for differences between individuals, collapsing the many ways people vary in their actions, beliefs, and motivations onto amore tractable set of latent dimensions (Allport, 1961 ; Cervone & Pervin, 2022) . For instance, a large body of work on the Big Five personality traits suggests that many people can be loosely individuated by their expression of just five abstract traits, usually referred to as, “openness,”“conscientiousness,” “extraversion,” “agreeableness,” and “neuroticism”(Goldberg, 1993) . To measure what a person is like along these dimensions, psychologists rely on questions designed to be maximally diagnostic. For instance, the Big Five Inventory asks respondents to indicate how strongly they agree with statements such as,“I see myself as someone who is curious about many different things” (John & Srivastava, 1999) . The standard Big Five Inventory contains 44 such questions, yet efforts to identify the most diagnostic items have distilled the original inventory down to as few as 10 (Rammstedt & John, 2007 ; Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann Jr, 2003) . What makes these questions diagnostic is the degree to which individual responses vary and “hang together” across questions, allowing psychologists to reliably map individuals onto the underlying dimensions that best differentiate them. In addition to their psychometric properties, the usefulness of these questions for measuring what others are like has been assessed from a range of perspectives, including their stability across languages and cultures (Steyn & Ndofirepi, 2022 ; Costa Mastrascusa et al., 2023 ; Gurven, V

FAQs

Why do some questions help us learn about others better than others?

The paper argues that questions differ in diagnostic value along a latent interpersonal depth dimension, with deeper questions enabling more informative social inference than small talk.

How were question depth and usefulness assessed in the study?

In Experiment 1, participants evaluated a large bank of open-ended conversational questions on scales reflecting their effectiveness for getting to know others.

How do responses relate to personality inferences?

In Experiment 2, written responses were analyzed with a language model to estimate how informative they were for personality prediction, with individualized predictions improving when incorporating free responses and when answers came from deeper questions.

Sep 4, 2026

Uploaded by Grenda