I have often seen many people in my surroundings getting into the loaded question fallacies. It is a question that has an inherent assumption about the situation and the responder can’t answer it without appearing guilty. These questions often derail the otherwise meaningful conversation because of their inflammatory nature, which might not be desirable for any of the party involved.

One such example I encountered during the interview of a fintech startup CEO, where one of the participants asked the following question:

“Who are you selling consumer data to?”

This question is loaded with the assumption that the company has been monetizing the data through its sale to the third party. Instead, a better situation could be agreement on assumption and then asking the conditional question. I think by avoiding this sort of fallacies, we can get into more meaningful and engaging conversations.

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