Insincere questions

FriendlyChar

It seems that some questions are not always sincere, that is a real quest for truth. Sometimes people ask questions which they know well the answer to, but asking themselves would make accepting the answer too uncomfortable, so they sort of 'project it' onto someone else. I'm saying some questions can be a form of projection, as psychologists put it.

Take the question a plump woman asks her husband, when she's feeling her rump in the mirror: 'Does my bum look big in this?' Now this contains the statement: 'my bum look big in this' - she seems to have even admitted it, but projected it instead to save herself from consciously accepting this reality.

What do you think?

Peregrinus

Well, there's nothing insincere about looking for a second opinion. Or about asking a rhetorical question. Or a socratic question.

We ask questions for all sorts of reasons; eliciting information that we don't already have but expect to get is only one. I don't see any reason for assuming that that's the only truly valid reason for asking a question. In particular, I don't see any inherent problem about asking a question to seek confirmation of something you already believe to be true, and I don't see any need to characterise it as "projection".

PS: I don't think what you characterise as projection here has much to do with what psychologists mean by projection. Psychological projection involves attributing your own faults to others, so that you can reflect on and talk about them without acknowledging that they are, in fact, your faults. So a woman who is unwilling to confront her own failure to conform with the social ideal as regards bottom size would instead accuse someone else of having too large a bottom, and then talk about it as their problem rather than her own. A woman who is projecting in this sense will not ask if you think she has too large a bottom, since that would open up discussion of her bottom, which is the very thing she hopes to avoid by projection.

leahwechat

I don't think it's an insincere question,because different people has different views.