Throwing Curveballs: Unpacking Surprising Questions in Evaluative Settings and Probing their Origins 

Abstract

From the interview room to the press room, much of organizational life unfolds in evaluative contexts wherein evaluatees present information that positions themselves in a favorable light, while evaluators ask penetrating questions to evaluate these claims. Although some questions are readily addressed, others are surprising in ways that can unsettle even a carefully crafted presentation. We propose that questions can be surprising in two analytically distinct ways: when they are off-topic and when they are unexpected. We argue that questions that are on-topic but unexpected are most likely to be disruptive. We refer to such questions as curveballs and examine the situations under which they arise. Whereas prior work on interpersonal evaluation focuses on actor-and interaction-level explanations, we consider the role of a structural property: the information environment. We theorize that evaluators are more likely to pose curveball questions when there is a dearth, rather than abundance, of public information about the evaluatee. To evaluate these ideas, we develop a novel measure of curveball questions using natural language processing techniques. Using a corpus of quarterly earnings calls and data on newspaper closures, which induce exogenous variation in a locally headquartered firm's information environment, we find support for our theory. 

Keywords: economic scoiology, expression games, natural language processing, discourse, executives