Answer with consequences, not definitions
This question is asked verbatim in enough screens that most candidates have a rehearsed paragraph for it, which is precisely why the rehearsed paragraph scores badly. Four definitions delivered fluently tell the interviewer you have read a tutorial. What distinguishes a good answer is stating, for each pillar, what it lets you change about a design and what you give up by using it. That framing survives follow-ups, because every follow-up here is a why or a when not.
Encapsulation buys you a place to enforce an invariant. Because the object owns its state and controls the paths that mutate it, there is exactly one region of code responsible for the rule that a balance never goes negative, or that a date range never has its end before its start. The consequence is that when the rule is violated, you know where to look. Give up encapsulation and the invariant becomes a convention distributed across every caller, which is a different way of saying it is not enforced.
Abstraction buys you the freedom to change the implementation without renegotiating with callers. Naming a PaymentGateway with a charge operation means the callers depend on the idea of charging, not on an HTTP client and a retry policy. The cost is real and usually underweighted: every abstraction is a guess about which axis will vary, and a wrong guess is worse than no abstraction, because now the change you need is the one the interface forbids.
Inheritance buys you shared implementation and a subtype relationship in one move. It is also the tightest coupling any mainstream language offers — a subclass can depend on the order in which its parent calls its own methods, so a behaviour-preserving change in the parent can break it. That is the fragile base class problem, and it is why the sensible default is composition, with inheritance reserved for the case where the subtype genuinely is substitutable for the parent everywhere the parent is used.
Polymorphism buys you the ability to add a case without editing the code that consumes it. A new Shape implementation requires no change to the renderer; a new payment provider requires no change to the checkout. The cost is that control flow stops being locally readable. A reader looking at shape.area() cannot tell which code runs without knowing what was constructed, and that indirection is a genuine debt when there are only two implementations and no third is coming.
Abstraction versus encapsulation
These get conflated because both are described as "hiding", and the sentence "abstraction hides implementation, encapsulation hides data" is repeated everywhere without clarifying anything. The useful separation is that they operate at different stages.
Abstraction is a design decision about what the type is. You decide that the concept your callers need is a queue with push and pop, that whether it is backed by an array or a linked list is not part of the concept, and that ordering is. Encapsulation is the mechanism by which the code makes that decision hold: private fields, no leaked mutable references, mutation only through operations that maintain the invariant. Abstraction is what you chose to expose; encapsulation is why the choice cannot be circumvented.
Two consequences follow. You can have abstraction without encapsulation — a well-named interface whose implementation stores its state in a public static map — and it will be violated within a release. And you can have encapsulation without abstraction, which is the more common failure:
The first class is what most codebases mean by encapsulation, and it is a data holder with ceremony. The second one holds a rule.
Where a fluent answer still fails
The failure is not getting a definition wrong. It is answering entirely in the language of access modifiers — encapsulation is private, abstraction is an abstract class or an interface — because that reduces four design ideas to four keywords in one language, and it collapses immediately when the interviewer asks about a language without them. Encapsulation in C is a struct whose definition lives in the .c file and whose header exposes only functions taking an opaque pointer; there is no private anywhere and the invariant is protected. In Python nothing is truly private, and encapsulation is upheld by convention plus the module boundary. If your answer cannot survive being moved to either language, it was a description of Java syntax rather than of object orientation.
The related tell is being unable to say when a pillar is wrong. Anyone who has designed something has an inheritance hierarchy they regret, and saying so — the second level that turned out to need only half of what it inherited, the abstraction added for a second implementation that never arrived — is worth more than the four definitions delivered perfectly.
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