Questions that ask whether or not some statement is true are called yes–no questions (or polar questions, or general questions), since they can in principle be answered by a "yes" or "no" (or similar words or expressions in other languages).
It could be interesting, that in everyday life, usually or statistically or empirically what is the more common answer to a yes/no question.
I guess the more common answer to this kind of questions is " no ", because in general for a complex system, a stringent successful outcome is conditional on a very large no. of process variables, odds of which to be precisely at the settings required for a successful outcome is very small in general.
The answer to a question by a human depends on:
-who is asking the question.
Imagine that it is a politician the subject answering does not like. A no seems more likely
-the mood of the person asked to answer
Someone happy will think positive, someone upset will favour no.
There is a technique used by psychologists, which is called "framing", setting a context which will drive towards the desired result.
-the meaning of the question
That would be te genuine answer, without any psychological distorsion such as the ones above.
Let me give an example. You are asking very elderly customers:
-are you over 80?
with three answers possible:
yes/no/prefers not to answer
-idem, are you over 70?
-idem, are you over 60?
-idem are you over 50?
If you want people to answer "yes" when the facts are "yes", then you should prefer the question "are you over 50?", because if you're 80, you feel "young" being in the category of the people older than 50.
You may be interested to read about Behavioural Economics, with great authors such as Kahneman & Tversky....
I'm not sure about a bias across general adult populations, but there has been a lot of work on this in children and in neurodiverse adults. At least in children, there is an affirmation bias that can change over time and with culture; some studies show that affirmation bias/bias toward acquiescence decreases as language ability increases. Article Do Young Children Always Say Yes to Yes-No Questions? A Meta...
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