IME this is a special case of a more general refusal to answer “hypothetical questions”, even when they aren’t lose-lose.
I used to run into this a lot… someone says something, I ask some question about it of the form “So, are you saying that if X, then Y?” and they simply refuse to answer the question on the (sometimes unarticulated) grounds that I’m probably trying to trick them. (Tone of voice and bodyparl is really important here; I started running into this reaction less when I became more careful to project an air of “this is interesting and I’m exploring it” rather than “this is false and I am challenging it”.)
This also used to infuriate me: I would react to it as an expression of distrust. It helped to explicitly understand what was going on, though… once I recognized that it actually was an expression of distrust, and that the distrust was entirely reasonable if they couldn’t read my mind, I stopped getting so angry about it. (Which in turn helped with the bodyparl and tone issues.)
IME this is a special case of a more general refusal to answer “hypothetical questions”, even when they aren’t lose-lose.
I used to run into this a lot… someone says something, I ask some question about it of the form “So, are you saying that if X, then Y?” and they simply refuse to answer the question on the (sometimes unarticulated) grounds that I’m probably trying to trick them. (Tone of voice and bodyparl is really important here; I started running into this reaction less when I became more careful to project an air of “this is interesting and I’m exploring it” rather than “this is false and I am challenging it”.)
This also used to infuriate me: I would react to it as an expression of distrust. It helped to explicitly understand what was going on, though… once I recognized that it actually was an expression of distrust, and that the distrust was entirely reasonable if they couldn’t read my mind, I stopped getting so angry about it. (Which in turn helped with the bodyparl and tone issues.)