Excited to hear your updates!” my friend texts me before our first catch-up of the year. The agenda for tonight’s conversation is packed, because in the past three months there have been many developments: she’s got a new job; I’ve got a new flat and a new boyfriend.

“How’s your apartment?” she asks immediately when we meet. I say, it’s nice. “I’m so happy for you, because when we moved house last year it was such a drag!” she replies. “But oh my God, you must come around to see our new sofa. It’s green and velvet and…” We spend the next 10 minutes on the subject of her living room. Finally, she asks about my holiday plans. I tell her I’m going to Greece this summer, but before I can divulge any details, she’s off again – this time telling me about her Australian adventure back in January. Over the next two hours, I ask about her new job, her relationship, and how her parents are doing. Every once in a while, I’m offered the floor – only to have it immediately snatched away from me. We hug goodbye. It’s only when I leave that I realise she didn’t listen to me at all.

Like everything else, this social faux pas has got a trendy name: boomerasking. According to a new study by researchers from Harvard Business School and Imperial College London published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, boomerasking (a play on the word boomerang, a tool that is designed to return to the owner when thrown) is a conversation format whereby someone asks a question, lets the other person briefly answer, and then immediately brings the focus back to themselves. A boomerasker typically believes that their feigned interest in the other’s perspective will leave a positive impression. Instead, the study found, they come across as “egocentric and disinterested”.

This self-absorbed, selfish dynamic can be applied to any type of conversation, no matter how close you are. It could be a colleague, whose name you always forget, enquiring about how your weekend was, only to spend the next five minutes talking about the mini-break they went on in Barcelona two months ago. Or your hairdresser quizzing you on your relationship, only to launch into a rant about their own useless paramour for the entire appointment. Otherwise, it could be a family friend probing you on when you’re going to finally settle down, only so they can use it as a springboard to boast about their dear daughter currently honeymooning with her banker husband in Santorini.

Boomerasking can be as brazen as this, but it can also be subtle and insidious. I’ve had boomeraskers attempt to disguise their covert strategy by using a filler line to acknowledge, ostensibly at least, my very brief answer. “That’s really good to hear,” they’ll say, before performing a frankly pretty impressive U-turn to talk about themselves. I might not register it in the moment when I’m faced with a boomerasker in real time, but I’ll come away from the interaction feeling dismissed.

The study defined three types of boomerasking: There’s “ask-bragging”, which is when someone wants to know a little bit about you only so that they can top it and gloat about themselves; “ask-complaining”, which is when a question is posed for the sole purpose of allowing the asker to dump their own negative experience; and finally, “ask-sharing”, which is when someone raises a question and follows it with the disclosure of something completely neutral and mundane, like a weird dream.

It’s unsurprising to learn that those on the receiving end of a boomerasker were left irritated and didn’t enjoy the interaction, whereas the boomerasker themselves thought the conversation had gone swimmingly. More interesting is the fact that when participants were asked if they had ever boomerasked, or experienced boomerasking in a conversation, most admitted that they had done both.

Boomeraskers might seem ignorant or self-obsessed, but at the end of the day, who among us isn’t? It’s human nature to delight in talking about yourself, apparently. Several studies have concluded that people find self-disclosure extremely pleasurable, to the extent that talking about oneself activates the same brain regions that are triggered when we’re eating good food or having sex.

In 2013, researchers from Harvard University’s Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience lab tracked the neural reaction of 195 participants when they were talking about themselves versus non-self topics. Self-thought activated the brain’s dopamine system – the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental, to get scientific about it. These areas are generally associated with reward, motivation, and pleasurable stimuli, such as having sex, using cocaine, or eating a delicious meal.

If we enjoy talking about ourselves so much, then why do boomeraskers believe that prefacing their self-announcement with a question is better than just straight-up delivering their news? And why do they think most of us won’t notice their stealthy tactics for dominating conversation? Well, according to the study, most of us prefer conversing using “openers” to avoid coming across as immodest, while others may think that asking loads of questions is best practice for a normal conversation. At the end of the day, you’ve got to give and take.

If you’re reading this and suddenly realise that you’re a boomerasker, a quick fix can be posing questions that you cannot answer yourself. For example, if you don’t own a dog, but they do, ask about their dog! And, if you’re concerned about losing friends over your penchant for self-chatter, don’t worry – most people would prefer you just blurted out your news instead of hiding behind an insincere question, anyway.

“Communicators may be better liked when they straightforwardly share their brags, complaints, and interests – without prefacing their self-disclosures with a question,” says the study. The authors suggest one way of showing responsiveness is “‘conversational uptake’ … for example, asking a follow-up question, acknowledging what they have said, repeating it, paraphrasing, or reformulating it in some way”. In short: slow down, listen, and react to the emotions of your friend/colleague/hairdresser/partner. And when it’s their turn to speak, put a sock in it.