Can Questions Lead to Change? An Analogue Experiment

Many non-traditional therapies treat questions as an influential therapeutic technique, but there is little research on this assumption. The goal of the present study was to test the effects of questions in an analogue experiment, that is, a lab experiment that used forms of questions drawn from psychotherapy. The experimenter used contrasting sets of questions to interview undergraduate volunteers about a difficult task they had just done. The broad research question was whether these interviews on the same topic but with a different focus could affect the interviewee, producing different viewpoints and even different behaviors. As predicted, the interviewees' spontaneous explanations of their task performance was congruent with the focus of questioning in their interview—both immediately afterward and one week later. Also as predicted, one kind of questioning improved task performance one week later. Clinical examples throughout illustrate the implications of this research for practice, training, and supervision.