A leading question occurs when someone asks a question that suggests a particular answer, presumably intentionally.
Is there any special term for when this occurs subconsciously - i.e. when the asker reveals something about what they expect (or want) the answer to be but does so completely unknowingly?
In this article from FutureLearn – Logical and Critical Thinking The University of Auckland, this phenomenon is simply referred to as unconscious cueing.
Wilhelm Von Osten, a German high school mathematics instructor, thought that people dramatically underestimated the intelligence and reasoning skills of animals.
A man of science, he set out to test his hypothesis by teaching mathematics to a horse called Hans. [the late C19] Hans quickly showed real aptitude; soon he could read a number written on a board and tap his hoof with the correct number of times.
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Van Osten [went on to asking the horse questions (in German). He] would ask questions such as “If the first day of the month is a Wednesday, what is the date of the following Monday?” Hans would tap his foot six times. “What is the square root of sixteen?” Four taps.
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[This phenomenon was investigated by a young psychologist named Oskar Pfungst.] Pfungst designed a careful set of experiments and began testing Hans. He soon noticed that Hans performed well when questioned under his normal conditions. But the horse’s accuracy dropped when the questioner stood farther away than normal. And if the questioner didn’t know the answer to a question or was concealed from him, Hans’ accuracy plummeted to nearly zero. Pfungst hypothesized that Hans’ cleverness relied on him having a close, unobstructed view of a person who knew the correct answer.
With that in mind, Pfungst began watching the questioners, and he noticed that as Hans tapped his hoof in response to a question, their breathing, posture, and expression showed subtle signs of increasing tension, tension which disappeared when Hans made the correct tap. Innocently and without realizing they were doing so, Pfungst concluded, the questioners were giving Hans a cue when to stop tapping.
Pfungst had discovered ‘unconscious cueing’, the influence of researchers’ subtle and unintentional signals on their subjects, and it is now recognized as widespread in research involving human subjects as well as animals.
I remember being warned about the need to avoid cueing answers when in teacher training.
I believe it would be referred to in psychology as observer-expectancy effect. It is essentially a form of researcher’s bias, where the researcher subconsciously projects what they would like to see or hear from the participant.
Hope this was the answer you were looking for.
