Where Questions Come From: Reusing Old Questions in New Situations

Question asking is a powerful means by which humans learn. However, asking a question requires searching through a massive space of possible questions to find a single question that is relevant and informative. How do humans efficiently accomplish this task? Drawing on prior research on other decision problems, we propose that the search for new questions is constrained by those encountered in the past, so that people frequently reuse questions (or parts of questions) rather than generating new questions “from scratch.” We find empirical support for this prediction, and we find that this “question reuse” has consequences for the informational value of people's questions. Taken together, this research sheds new light on the mechanisms behind human question asking abilities and, more generally, how we narrow down a large space of possibilities to find a single solution.