One of the paradoxes of improving your small talk skills is that sometimes the things we do to be polite can actually work against us. We all seem to learn from a young age that when someone asks us a question, especially at the start of a conversation, we should ask them the same question in return.

If someone asks, “How are you?” you give a brief response and then ask back, “So, how are you?” If someone asks, “How’s work?” we feel obligated to ask the same question back. Even with family, we feel obligated to ask how someone’s mother is doing if they ask us. These responses are known as “mirror questions.” Although they seem polite, research from Harvard by Associate Professor of Business Administration Alison Wood Brooks shows they don’t make us more likable.

Brooks is a Harvard Business School Professor and author of Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves.

What’s wrong with mirror questions?

Brooks and her team analyzed 398 conversations and found four dominant question types: introductory, mirror, topic-switching, and follow-up. Introductory questions are the post-handshake “How are you?” or “What’s new?” questions we ask when we first greet someone. Topic-switching questions move the conversation in a new direction, and follow-up questions let us probe deeper after someone responds.

In her book, Talk, Brooks says that the problem with mirror questions is that they seem perfunctory, that we’re........

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