How to Handle People Who Are Eternally Evasive

Sometimes the questions you ask of another person have a more urgent quality. You’re trying to plan a weekend getaway with friends and want to know when is the best time to leave. Although most of your friends quickly offer up their availability, there’s one holdout who makes it impossible for you to confirm a date.

You might also know someone who never gives you a direct answer to a question. They force you to guess, ask a question in return (“Nothing. What’s new with you?”), or pretend they didn’t hear you. Such individuals make conversation difficult, to say the least.

In psychological research, refusal to answer questions shows up in what’s called “missing data.” An investigator sends a 40-item questionnaire to an online sample, and, although most people reach 100 percent participation, a stubborn minority provides incomplete data. Why didn’t they want to answer all the questions? Are they simply lazy, or was there something about the unanswered questions that they found offensive?

earning from the missing-data problem in research might help you understand the rationale behind the evasive people in your life. Perhaps there are better ways to ask questions of certain people than the direct request for information.

Princeton University’s Rowena Gomila and Chelsey Clark (2022) note that “Attrition is the most pervasive and critical type of missingness in psychology studies” (p. 143). In one common form of attrition, people just skip questions when given the chance (i.e., when they aren’t required to answer every question). In some ways, attrition is the dirty little secret of questionnaire research, though it’s not really all that “little.” You may not be aware of this, but when researchers report the results from their work, it’s rare that they tell you how many holes there were in their data set.

Not answering questions isn’t limited, then, to interpersonal situations. In psychological research, investigators may not gather all the information they need because participants find the questions too personal and anxiety -provoking. Such questions may involve requests for sexual history, mental health symptoms, employment status, and opinions on controversial topics. It’s also possible that participants just become bored and don’t feel like completing the study. In any case, as the authors note, “Attrition is rarely innocuous” (p. 147).

It's the former situation, in which questions tap into some underlying set of worries or concerns of participants, that may be most like what happens in real-life settings. If some insight could be gained from how researchers can work around this problem to your own experiences, this could help you as you reword or rephrase questions that may be uncomfortable to the other person. You can also learn whether some people just prefer to remain silent.