Todd Rogers is an assistant professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Michael I. Norton is an associate professor at the Harvard Business School.

“You get to ask the questions you like. I get to give the answers I like,” Mitt Romney told a reporter dissatisfied with an evasive answer. The ensuing criticism – “How dare he not answer our questions?” – seemingly suggested that Romney’s efforts to dodge questions was out of the ordinary. In fact, the only thing unusual about Romney’s dodge attempt was that it failed. Successful politicians elevate dodging questions to an art form, and our research suggests that dodging can be a surprisingly easy – and effective – way for politicians to hoodwink voters without technically lying.

In voters' eyes, politicians are better off answering a question they weren't asked than inelegantly answering the question at hand.

In our experiments, viewers watched videos of politicians answering questions during debates. Sometimes, politicians actually answered the questions they were asked – and viewers rated them favorably. This sounds like good news, but politicians who answered a different question than they were asked (answering a question about illegal drug use with a not-quite-related answer about health care) were rated just as favorably as those who actually answered the question. More disturbingly, politicians who dodged the question but did so in a smooth, practiced fashion were rated more favorably than those who answered the question but in a less fluid fashion: politicians are better off answering the wrong question well than the right question poorly. (Not all dodges go unnoticed – politicians who answered a question about the war on terrorism by riffing on health care were both caught, and punished.)

So rampant is question dodging that Fox News and Twitter teamed up on an innovative strategy to catch would-be dodgers, encouraging viewers during last Monday's Republican presidential debate in South Carolina to tweet in real time about whether each answer was a dodge. This strategy is likely to work. In our experiments, asking viewers to focus on politicians’ efforts to dodge dramatically increased dodge detection. A second intervention also proved successful: posting the text of questions on the screen while politicians answered also improved detection.

These interventions – easy to implement and essentially free – help to keep politicians honest and have an added benefit: they encourage viewers to pay attention not to surface features but to deeper content, helping us to remember to weight substance over style.