Let’s say you’re at a cafe, and after the chef recommends their new special dessert, the waiter later asks, “You loved our amazing new dessert, right?” This kind of question doesn’t give you room to critically evaluate how you truly feel about it.

The right question in this situation would be, “How would you rate our new dessert?” This allows you to truly evaluate your experience and feelings. The first question, however, nudges you toward a positive response, making it difficult to critique the dessert if it was actually not that great.

Leading questions steer you toward a specific response, often because survey designers expect you to feel a certain way. When designing your own surveys, you need to be cautious of this to ensure you collect the feedback you need, not just what you hope to hear.

Let’s discuss leading questions in surveys and how to avoid them to ensure you collect the feedback you need.

What Is a Leading Question?

A leading question is structured in a way that assumes and implies an answer.

Leading questions aren’t always very obvious, like the cafe example; sometimes, it’s very subtle. It’s when you ask your users questions like, “Don’t you just hate slow customer support?” It’s easy to ask this because years of customer feedback have told you this, but you’re not giving room for customers to tell you their actual pain points outside of speed.

Leading questions are formed from our biases, so we plant ideas in the minds of the respondents without even knowing, because it’s the answer we expect. The problem with it is that while you will get the answer you hope for, they are not really helping you. For example, let’s say you are carrying out an employee satisfaction survey and you ask leading questions. It won’t help you discover what’s draining their morale, and your workplace structure and policies won’t improve.

Common Types of Leading Questions (With Examples)

The majority of leading questions tend to fall into these categories:

1. Assumption-Based Leading Questions

This happens when you’re convinced that respondents are supposed to feel a certain way, so your question presumes their answer. For example, “How often do you enjoy our smoothies?” This assumes your customers enjoy your smoothies. The right question would be, “How often do you order our smoothies in a week?”

2. Leading by Language or Coercion

This is when you unintentionally coerce an answer from your respondents because you’re asking from a point of bias. For example, “Don’t you agree our prices are fair?” This pressures the respondent to agree with you, because it would make it awkward for them to tell you if they feel your prices aren’t. The right question would be, “How do you feel about our pricing?“

3. Forced-Choice Leading Questions

These are questions based on direct implications due to a product, person, or service’s current attitude and your perceived future consequences. For example, “Our competitors have slow service. Do you prefer our fast delivery?” This makes the competitor sound bad when the user may not have a problem with service speed, which can paint you as a malicious competitor. The right way to rephrase it would be, “What do you value most in a delivery service?“

4. Interrelated Leading Questions

These questions use a statement or a popular opinion to nudge respondents to respond a certain way. For example, “Candidate is unqualified for the position. What are your thoughts?” Even if the statement is true, you didn’t allow respondents to tell you how they feel about the candidate and what makes the candidate qualified from their perspective. The right question would be, “How would you rate Candidate A’s eligibility for the position?” You can then follow up with questions asking them to rate the candidate’s eligibility based on different criteria.

Why You Should Avoid Leading Surveys

Leading surveys prevent you from collecting the true opinions of your respondents and skew your survey results. Here’s how it plays out:

• False Positives: If you ask, “How amazing was our new feature?“, most respondents will rate it higher than if you ask neutrally. When you encourage only specific answers, the responses won’t highlight the underlying issues. For example, asking “You’re enjoying our amazing new features, right?” might prevent you from discovering that the majority of users don’t like the feature.
• Misguided Decisions: Inaccurate data will only lead to miscalculated decisions. A survey claiming “90% of employees love our new policy” (because it was asked leadingly) doesn’t magically erase their dissatisfaction; it will only hide it. If you choose to keep your policies based on this survey data, you’ve acted based on inaccurate data, and that decision benefits neither you nor the employees.
• Wasted Resources: This is one of the most painful side effects. The data you collected is skewed, so all the effort and resources you put into setting up your data collection are wasted. The data you got doesn’t reflect the respondents’ true feelings and opinions, so you have unreliable data that cannot help you make any decisions.

How to Spot a Leading Question in Your Survey

The truth is, most people don’t intentionally lead respondents to answers. You created the survey because you wanted to hear their opinion, but because you already have some data or are sure of how they would respond, you take away that option to decide.

One of the best ways to spot leading questions is to actively look at questions from the respondents’ perspective and observe if it would make you feel a certain way if you don’t agree with the narrative of the questions (your questions shouldn’t have a narrative in the first place). It’s asking yourself these questions:

• Does the question assume an opinion?
• Does it use emotionally charged words (e.g., “How frustrating was the checkout process?”)?
• Does it limit response options (e.g., “Was our service great or outstanding?“)

Tools That Help You Avoid Leading Questions

• Formplus Template Bank: Our survey templates already contain neutrally phrased questions that help you save time and collect accurate and reliable data. You can use our satisfaction survey templates and feedback forms that are specifically designed to avoid bias and help you collect the real opinion of your audience.
• AI Review: You can also create your questions and run prompt AI tools like ChatGPT to examine if your questions are leading and how you rephrase to sound neutral.

Best Practices for Writing Unbiased Survey Questions

• Use neutral language: Avoid using emotionally charged or loaded language like “great,” “disappointing,” etc.
• Offer balanced scales: Don’t ask questions like “Do you like product A, (Yes or No)?” Choosing “No” may feel too strong for respondents who don’t exactly dislike the feature, but still feel like there’s room for improvement. Instead, use a rating scale that allows them to express the level of their satisfaction and rephrase the question to ask, “On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your satisfaction with product A?”
• Test with a small group: Before launching the survey at full scale, you test with a small group to see if they feel pressured by any of the questions and if they interpret questions as intended.
• Use open-ended follow-ups: Aside from providing multiple options, also include open-ended questions that allow respondent to explain exactly how they feel in their own words.

The Bottom Line: Give Respondents Room to Express Themselves

Sure, leading questions can help you steer your audience in the direction that you want, but this only works when you’re pitching an idea to them, not when you actually need their opinions. 

Leading questions don’t allow you to achieve the main goal of creating the survey: collecting true opinions and feedback. Instead, they reflect your biases that further lead you down the path of poor decisions because you are working with inaccurate data.

Resources: Check out our template bank for well-curated survey templates that avoid leading questions and bias.