Loaded questions are a kind of query that’s designed to be biased or main, and to elicit a specific response from the particular person being questioned. They’re usually utilized in persuasive contexts, equivalent to promoting or political debate, the place the objective is to affect the opinion of the viewers.
Loaded questions will be constructed in quite a lot of methods, however they sometimes share some widespread traits. First, they usually include assumptions or presuppositions that aren’t explicitly acknowledged, however that are more likely to be accepted by the particular person being questioned. For instance, the query “Have you ever stopped beating your spouse?” presupposes that the particular person being questioned has in some unspecified time in the future crushed their spouse. Second, loaded questions usually use emotionally charged language that’s designed to evoke a specific response. For instance, the query “How will you assist a candidate who needs to destroy our nation?” is more likely to elicit a damaging response from somebody who helps the candidate in query.
