Why Asking Questions Feels So Risky Right Now — Shira Hoffer

 

Airdate: February 18, 2026

Shira Hoffer: There are ways to ask questions that feel genuine, and there are ways to ask questions that are really just kind of counter attacks where you, like, plop a question mark at the end so that you can, you know, feel like you've asked a question.

Julie Rose: Hey, it's Julie. Welcome to Uncomfy. A lot of us are feeling frustrated and confused right now about how to stay open to others when it seems like we live in different realities. I feel like I'm always walking on eggshells with people, but I don't want to give up on connection or retreat into a bubble where everybody thinks just like I do. This is a podcast about staying with the moments we usually want to escape: the awkward ones, the tense ones, the ones that might actually change us for good. There are not easy answers, but there is a lot we can learn from each other, so let's get Uncomfy.

Shira Hoffer: My palms definitely got sweaty, and I felt like everybody was looking at me. My heart started racing a little bit. I wasn't really sure what to say. I didn't know if I said one thing would it upset one person or another thing would upset another. There was the professor, there were the students, and I really just felt stuck.

Julie Rose: Folks, I want you to meet Shira Hoffer. She recently graduated from Harvard, and while she was there, she founded a nonprofit called The Viewpoints Project, which we'll hear more about in just a bit, but Shira, welcome. It's so great to have you.

Shira Hoffer: Thank you so much for having me.

Julie Rose: Okay, tell us about that moment. You were in a class, it sounds like, professor, other students. When was this, and what happened?

Shira Hoffer: Yeah, so it was my freshman year at Harvard. I went to a small Jewish high school, uh, growing up and was really interested in kind of exploring different backgrounds and identities and cultures when I came to Harvard, and so I took this class about kind of race and identity in America, um, and was interested in, in hopefully having a diverse set of classmates and learning about perspectives that I hadn't lived before or even been really in community with, and, um, I walked in, you know, one day, and it said on the whiteboard, you know, "How to dismantle the university system," and I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." I didn't have a particularly negative response to that, per se. I was, you know, 19 and curious why we were dismantling the system, and so I, I said, "You know, wait a sec," I raised my hand. I said, "You know, before we talk about 'how', can, can someone just let me know 'why', uh, so that I understand, you know, why are we trying to dismantle the system, and then I'm really delighted to, you know, learn 'how'," and there was kind of this awkward silence as though everyone knew the answer to the question except for me, and I kind of started, that was when I started to get nervous. You know, my palm started sweating, and I, the question wasn't really answered. It wasn't really dismissed, but it kind of seemed like it was not gonna get answered, and so I just kind of sat there and, you know, let the class move on. I don't really remember how we were supposed to dismantle the system, but after class I went up and asked the professor, I said, you know, "Sorry if I asked a question that was offensive or insensitive. Um, I really didn't mean to, I was just, I'm still not quite sure, you know, why we're dismantling the system," and the professor shared that oftentimes the folks who take her class experience racism and homophobia in other classes, and that this classroom was meant to be a safe space from those experiences, and that was the explanation kind of given is, "We don't really ask questions like that in this class because of these experiences that students have," and it was framed, you know, to the professor's credit, really in a, in an effort to be inclusive, to make people feel like they wanted to learn, to feel comfortable, and I was just kind of confused as to how my question related to racism and homophobia, and I just felt kind of lost, and so I was like, "You know what? Okay, I'm just not gonna, you know, ask more questions. This is how it is, and that's fine." I spent some time kind of, I have a, a hypothesis as to how those things kind of all tie together, but it was kind of my first introduction to this question of campus speech and controversy and censorship and, you know, how different environments are fantastic for asking questions and others may feel more restrictive.

Julie Rose: Did you ask questions moving forward? You had a, the rest of the semester in that class.

Shira Hoffer: I, yeah, I think I, I spent the next couple classes certainly not really asking questions. I, before I would ask a question, I did a lot more thinking than I might have in other classes about whether it was appropriate and what that meant. Um, I'm not really the type to self-censor, but I think that's maybe more of a personality trait than anything else.

Julie Rose: This moment was influential for you. What did it inspire over the coming couple of years you were at Harvard?

Shira Hoffer: Well, I can maybe go back to a story when I was 11. My family would have family meetings to discuss things going on in the family, and there was always a bowl of M&Ms, and we were encouraged to kind of bring different topics, and, um, you know, one time my brother said, "Well, here's a list of things I don't like about my sister." That was his kind of topic for the family meeting,

Julie Rose: I can so I can so relate to that. Younger, younger brother? Younger, right? Is that,

Shira Hoffer: a younger brother, absolutely, and my family, to their credit, I mean, we went through that list item by item, and some of the items were things like, "I wish Shira wouldn't push me every time I walked past her in the hallway." It's like, "Okay, Shira, you know, don't push your brother. That's not nice, whatever," and then there was, you know, "I don't like the way that Shira laughs," and that was more like, "Okay, Eli, you know, Shira can't control how she laughs. That's just something we do," so we're a very conflict healthy family, I would say, and so I've always been interested in kind of in, in issues of free speech and feeling uncomfortable and exposing ourselves to, to, to cultures and perspectives that maybe don't feel super familiar.

Julie Rose: So, understanding conflict became an important part of what you were doing in your studies. You became, even, a mediator for small claims court, right, and, and you founded the, The Viewpoints Project. Just sum up for us in a, in a sentence or two, what that nonprofit is aimed at doing.

Shira Hoffer: Yeah, so our goal is to create kind of cultures or to help foster cultures in education where curious disagreement is the norm, so the ability for students to engage in, and teachers to facilitate, professors to facilitate, you know, environments where curiosity toward the things that we disagree with is the, the way that we approach them.

Julie Rose: "Curiosity," okay, I really wanna spend some time on this with you, Shira, because I think a lot of us have experienced what you did in that classroom, but in different environments, right? The, you know, I asked the question sort of, like, I'm a questioner too, and sometimes I ask questions and I am surprised that the person I asked it of is offended or, um, and, and it makes me nervous. Like, a lot of us have experienced that. Why, why do you think it is such a common thing right now to, to feel like, um, asking questions is risky?

Shira Hoffer: It's a big question. Um, I think there's a couple of angles from which to answer it. One of them is a neurological angle. So, I did not study neuroscience; I studied religion and social studies, but, um, we've done some research at The Viewpoints Project about why curious disagreement is, is so difficult, and one of the reasons is that there are pathways in our brain that are otherwise biologically advantageous that get in the way of this curiosity. So, for example, we need to be able to fit what we see in the world into categories to be able to process those categories and efficiently function in society. So, when we see things that look enough like a car, we think it's a car. If it looks enough like a chair, we sit in it, and the problem is then when we see a person who looks enough like, you know, what we think that person should be, or we hear a perspective that's enough like a stereotype that we're familiar with, we, again, in a biologically advantageous way, categorize those people because we need to continue to do the millions of things that we're doing all day every day, but people don't fit into categories like chairs or cars do. So, one explanation if you're feeling kind of hopeless is like, "Don't despair. Your body was actually built to interact with this world in this way, and you just have to override those natural systems." I say, "just," you have to override those natural systems, and there are, you know, skills and practices to do so, but there's a lot of science that, that explains why it's very difficult for us to be in these situations. Another one that's maybe a little bit softer is like, we all wanna feel like we belong, um, in whatever community we're in, whether that's our school, our church, our place of worship, um, even the gym, you know, we wanna feel like we are part of the group, and that's, again, both biologically and socially advantageous, but it makes it then harder when somebody that we feel like we belong with or is who in, in our group, comes up with something that we feel is threatening. There's an interesting study out of Stanford, I think from 2016, that talks about the salience of what, what kind of constitutes people's identities, and it used to be that we identified more with our religious, our cultural, our ethnic groups, but recently people are starting to identify more and more with their political perspectives. "I am a liberal," instead of, you know, "I politically identify, you know, I'm, I'm a registered democrat," for example, um, and so, therefore, if we're identifying with a viewpoint, a viewpoint that goes against that viewpoint is not only attack on the viewpoint, it's an attack on our identities, and that's really where we start to get nervous.

Julie Rose: Do you think that that shuts down curiosity a lot of the time? Just because we, we think, "Well, I don't have anything, uh, there's nothing I need to know about this person. Based on the post that I see that, that they've made on my Facebook feed, you know, like, I know everything I need to know about this person. I have zero questions. The

Shira Hoffer: Yeah, Absolutely. There's an idea, and I didn't come up with it, but I'm forgetting who did of, like, "satisficing," it's called, where it's like, if we understand enough, you know, our brain will say, "Well, now I totally get it," and that's unlikely. Like, it's, it's unlikely that you totally understand how somebody thinks, feels, believes based on, you know, the five sentence Facebook post that they made last week, but our brains, again, for efficiency, we're processing so much, so frequently, we have to feel like, and we also have this need for closure, too, a need for kind of clean endings. Like, TV shows end on a cliffhanger because they want us to keep watching, so we don't want things to end on a cliffhanger. We wanna be able to resolve them, and so all of that kind of makes this curiosity more difficult.

Julie Rose: I'd love to get your thoughts on something I've been thinking about because I'm a, I'm, I'm very curious. I'm somebody who will ask questions first and consider the impact later, which is not awesome, but maybe we're a little bit similar in that way, um, and I have on many an occasion asked a question that has been Interpreted in a way that I didn't intend, and I have to own that, right? Like, I asked the question, maybe there was something more, maybe there's a way that I could have phrased it differently, maybe it came off as a little impertinent or nosy or maybe it came off, part of what I think is that sometimes questions, curiosity has kind of been weaponized as a way, in some contexts, to be like, "Well, I'm just asking," but what you're really trying to do is undermine somebody's stance or, or demean them or diminish them, so, so it feels like curiosity, in our society, can often have a, can, like, is intended to be harmful, and so when you're just doing it because you are truly curious, it can also feel harmful or scary to people even if you don't intend, right? So, the thing I've been thinking about is like, "How can I be compassionately curious," right, you know, "Bring to the table maybe just more mindfulness or, or somehow prepare them for the question I'm about to launch at them?"

Shira Hoffer: Yeah, I love that question, and I have two thoughts for you. One is around phrasing and one is about transparency. So, around phrasing, there are ways to ask questions that feel genuine and there are ways to ask questions that are really just kind of counter attacks where you like plop a question mark at the end so that you can, you know, feel like you've asked a question.

Julie Rose: Can you think of an example to illustrate?

Shira Hoffer: Yeah, I was gonna say, the examples that we like to give is like, "Do" versus "don't," "should" versus "shouldn't." Any question where the, the, the first word of the question ends with "n't," like, a negation, right, is probably an accusation. So, "Shouldn't America close its borders," is actually you just saying, "I think America should close its borders," and then you put a question mark on the end to indicate that you want the other person to respond to you, whereas if you just changed it and you say, "Should America close its borders?" That's suddenly, and you can probably even hear it in, in just the phrasing, like, that, that's an open question, that allows somebody to say "yes" or "no" and not feel like you're gonna judge them either way. And then the second piece around transparency is, like, sometimes we wanna feel like we're super eloquent or we're super whatever, and so we wanna just kind of ask the question as it is, but I'm a big fan of just being super transparent and being like, "It's gonna sound to you like I'm attacking you with this question, but I promise you, I am genuinely curious about the answer, so, you know, I'm sorry in advance if it comes off as offensive, but I really just wanna know more about X, Y, Z." It's a little bit verbose, but if you're nervous about offending someone, one thing you could just do is say like, "I'm nervous about offending you, and I really don't want to, here's what I'm curious to know," and if you've kind of put that out there, I think it's a lot harder for that person to think, "Oh my God, they're trying to offend me," 'cause they've at least just stated that they're not.

Julie Rose: Why should I even bother then to ask the question if I'm nervous that it's gonna offend somebody?

Shira Hoffer: Well, because I think being nervous about something doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't do it. Um, I think there's plenty of things that we should do because we're nervous about them, ranging from, you know, going to school on your first day of preschool to, you know, trying out for the varsity sports team in high school. I think just as a premise, like, nerves can certainly indicate that there's danger, and sometimes it's important to pay attention to those signals of danger, but then thinking about, "Well, what is the, the benefit?" Like, if you're building a connection with someone, you're understanding them more deeply, you have the opportunity to widen your perspective, if you can kind of communicate to them that genuine curiosity, um, I think you, you stand to gain a lot and hopefully if you're able to communicate the authenticity with which you're asking the question, the risk that they're gonna be offended goes, I think, way down. I would say, though, that sometimes, and this is where, you mentioned mindfulness, I think this is sometimes where mindfulness comes in, is if you have a question to ask and you can stop for a second before you ask it, and ask yourself first, "Why am I asking this question?" Just to confirm that you're actually asking it because you wanna know. Sometimes, you might think that you're asking out of genuine curiosity, and then you think about it for a second more and you're like, "No, actually, I'm just trying to prove my point with a question mark at the end," that can be a really nice reset in, in hopefully fostering a more productive conversation.

Julie Rose: Is there a disagreement that stands out in your own life that you think a lot about or that, that you'd be willing to share with us?

Shira Hoffer: Yeah. Here's one where I kind of messed up and here's what I would've done, you know, differently. I was,I got in an argument on my college campus while I was still a student about the Israeli Palestinian conflict with a, a friend of mine who is also Jewish. It was right, it was like the day that Trump's kind of peace plan for Gaza came out, and we were debating whether or not that would be a good plan, and, you know, without talking so much about the details of the plan or anything, you know, he suggested that there was a, a benefit to the idea of removing the Palestinians from Gaza because it could, you know, maybe put them in a safer place, reunite them with their families who might be in exile, create more stability in the region, and I thought that that amounted to ethnic cleansing, which is a violation of international law, and I got all worked up about it, and he was saying, you know, "This is why it's a good thing," and I said, you know, "No, that's a, a violation." I started raising my voice, I started getting sweaty, I started feeling all these signs where, you know, I tell people, "This is where you should take a deep breath," and instead, I kind of plunged ahead, and finally I said, "Well, but don't you think that two wrongs don't make a right?" Which, okay, let's take a step back. "Don't you think," violated the rule from earlier around "don't," and leading question, I basically said, "I think that two wrongs don't make a right," and assumed that he thought the same thing, and I yelled at him, which was not particularly nice of me, and he said, "Well, in this case, I think two wrongs do make a right," and I kind of like froze. I was like, "Oh shoot." That's when it kind of dawned on me that I had broken all of my own rules in the first place and that it was that maybe we just kind of approached some fundamental tenets differently, that he thought that in some cases, two wrongs can in fact make a right, and his goal was to make a right, and he felt like weighing the pros and cons of this plan, even if something felt uncomfortable or even borderline illegal or even illegal, that that would rectify another wrong, which was Hamas' attack on Israel in October of 2023, and that that would ultimately lead to a more stable peace in the region, and therefore it was worth it, and it didn't occur to me that he might have thought that way. I just thought that he was being flippant about people's lives, and I, I apologized to him after that. I said, "You know, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have yelled at you. I shouldn't have assumed that. You know, if we were to have this conversation again, you know, I would go about it by asking you the benefits of that plan that you saw, and I would maybe share my perspective and ask you to reflect on that perspective, but instead I, you know, I got super worked up about it," and I think I like to share that story because it's, I think, humanizing. Like, I can yell at people, too, just like you, and these moments kind of happen and, and they're useful in, in reminding me that even the principles, which I think are super foundational, other people maybe didn't grow up with that, and so assuming that they do and then yelling at them based on their violation of a principle that they might not have even adopted in the first place is a, is an important thing, I think to think about, yeah.

Julie Rose: I also really appreciate— Thank you for sharing that; it's not easy to share our failures. Uh, I've done that publicly a couple of times too, and it's terrifying, but I really appreciate how you, uh, it sounds like you, you apologized and owned it, um, and I guess that's also another part of this curiosity. If we're afraid to cause offense and then we dare to ask or dare to engage and then we don't actually, it doesn't succeed, or someone does get offended, we, we can own it without losing our, our own, you know, self-respect, right, and sort of keep the relationship. It doesn't have to be the kind of thing where like, "Well, I'm gonna never ask them a question ever again," you know, or, "Shut that down and never talk to that person."

Shira Hoffer: I think that's where grace comes in in some sense. Like, if we think that we make mistakes, which we all do, then we can also assume that other people make mistakes because they're people too, and hopefully that allows us both to extend grace when they've offended us and then they say, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to," for us to be able to take that at face value and then also be able to go to them and say, "You know, I really didn't mean to hurt you in this instance, and I'm sorry that I did." That feels vulnerable, and I think we're not vulnerable enough in general, but I also think there's been this, this idea that an apology isn't enough, you shouldn't have done it in the first place. Like, the impact versus intent conversation, I think, sometimes makes us think that the impact is more important than the intent, and therefore the intent doesn't matter, and I think that framework of intent and impact sometimes gets in the way of curious disagreement, not because I don't think impact matters, of course, you know, if somebody's offended, they're offended, and you can't un offend them, but to take the impact along with the intent instead of writing off intent in favor of impact and saying, "Okay, you know, you did offend me. I'm still offended. I might take a couple of days before I'm willing to talk to you about it, maybe in a couple of days I'll recognize that you didn't mean to, and that doesn't mean that what you did was okay, but it means that I can understand you and perhaps you know, I have it in my heart to forgive you," and I think that kind of the framework of, of grace and forgiveness is super important in the, in the topic of curious disagreement as well.

Julie Rose: Shira Hoffer is the Executive Director of The Viewpoints Project, which you can find more about by visiting viewpointsproject.org. Shira, thank you for sharing your insights and your vulnerability with us today.

Shira Hoffer: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking with you.

Julie Rose: And thank you for getting Uncomfy with us today. How is curiosity playing out in your own life right now? Is it something you're tending to shy away from, or does it come naturally? I'd love to hear what works or what hasn't worked. Email uncomfy@byu.edu or find us on social media to continue the conversation; we are @uncomfy.podcaston Instagram. Uncomfy is a BYUradiopodcast. Samuel Benson produces it, and the team includes Hyobin Kim and Sam Payne. Our theme music was composed by Kelsey Nay. I'm Julie Rose. Can't wait to get Uncomfy with you again next week.