I might be remembering this wrong, but I read somewhere that if you want to get someone’s opinion about something, you should ask them what their friends think about the topic. The reasoning was that people will quite obviously try to guess your password if you ask them a question directly, but their close friends are much more likely to be closer to their true opinion than they let on, so you should ask them what their friends think about the topic. I can’t find where I read this at so take it with a grain of salt (anyone with better Google-fu able to find what I’m talking about?).
If true, this would seem to be a not-as-fallacious application of the typical mind fallacy.
It should work even better than that. I also seem to recall reading that people consistently overestimate how much they have in common with their friends (which is a useful cognitive bias for social bonding).
I might be remembering this wrong, but I read somewhere that if you want to get someone’s opinion about something, you should ask them what their friends think about the topic. The reasoning was that people will quite obviously try to guess your password if you ask them a question directly, but their close friends are much more likely to be closer to their true opinion than they let on, so you should ask them what their friends think about the topic. I can’t find where I read this at so take it with a grain of salt (anyone with better Google-fu able to find what I’m talking about?).
If true, this would seem to be a not-as-fallacious application of the typical mind fallacy.
It should work even better than that. I also seem to recall reading that people consistently overestimate how much they have in common with their friends (which is a useful cognitive bias for social bonding).