Asking Questions

The Inquisitive Instinct

The Question as Instinct

To confront the science of questions is to confront how we think, what we care about, and whether we are still capable of being surprised. This is no sentimental gesture. It is an indictment.

We are, as a species, compulsive askers. The toddler's incessant “Why?” is not merely endearing, it is a form of epistemic insubordination against adult complacency. But somewhere between primary school worksheets and committee meetings, the question gets tamed. Neutered. Reduced to a polite gesture of clarification. If we are honest, most of us stop asking altogether.

Two researchers Tuval Raz and Yoed Kenett have given us, in their primer: Questions in Information Seeking on question-asking, not a taxonomy but an anatomy of inquiry. What they dissect is not the question per se, but the conditions under which questioning is allowed to live.

Their Question-Asking in Information Seeking (QuInS) framework is not merely a model; it is a challenge against intellectual laziness, calling us to reexamine not only how we inquire, but why we so often choose not to.

Do we need a framework for asking good questions? My own observations are that society needs a healthy reboot in asking questions and rebuilding curiosity. This methodology is a good start for those that are willing to make the effort to hone this essential skill.

The QuInS model outlines a six-stage process: (1) the encounter with a stimulus or knowledge gap; (2) curiosity activation; (3) question formulation; (4) expression and social/contextual negotiation; (5) response evaluation; and (6) iterative refinement through follow-up or exploration. This is not a straight line, but a loop, recursive, dynamic, and dependent on a delicate interplay of cognition, emotion, and social constraint. Raz and Kenett are not merely interested in how we ask, but in what asking reveals about our agency, our epistemic desires, our resistance to incoherence.

Questions should not be thought of as a rhetorical accessory but as a structural necessity, resistance to the lull of easy answers.

Foundations of Inquiry

To truly grasp the mechanics of our inquisitive instinct, Raz and Kenett guide us through the foundational thinkers who dared to map this terrain. First they highlight the work of Kearsley as a meticulous researcher of curiosity, not only charting the straightforward path of a question, how it's chosen, formed, and voiced, but also revealing its hidden currents: the quick echo for clarity, the deep dive for knowledge (epistemic), the subtle signal of our feelings (expressive), or even the gentle tug to steer a conversation (social control).

Then they show the science of Flammer, who zeroes in on the raw hunger for information, arguing that a real question isn't just a polite noise; it's a sign that our mind is already wrestling with its own blind spots, that we already know enough to know what we're missing. His work suggests questions are flares sent up when our understanding bumps against a contradiction.

And perhaps most provocatively, they outline the research of Ram, the visionary who saw questions not just as tools, but as ‘knowledge goals’ in themselves. His creation of the AQUA system was a mechanical mind built to ask, to learn, to reorganize its own understanding, an uncanny simulacrum of our own cognitive drive, yet stripped bare of the human anxieties and desires that make our own questioning so fraught and so vital.

This epistemic hunger sits within a broader behavioral construct: information-seeking behavior. Drawing on the work of Floridi and Marchionini, Raz and Kenett define this as a goal-directed cognitive activity that integrates memory, knowledge models, and attention mechanisms to pursue resolution. The question is not a noise in discourse; it is the architecture of learning.

The entropy metaphor is not merely poetic, but formal: entropy, in information theory, quantifies uncertainty. Questions are not merely rhetorical or intellectual gestures. They are strategies for reducing entropy, efforts to compress the chaos of possibility into meaningful inference. The Optimal Experiment Design (OED) framework, discussed by Coenen, adds to this scientific framework. It treats question selection as hypothesis testing, a miniature experiment optimized for maximal informational yield.

If Raz and Kenett are engineers of the epistemic, Bloom is their architect. The Taxonomy: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create, is a cognitive ziggurat (image above). To climb it is not only to ascend in abstraction but to reclaim complexity. The Primer adds texture to this hierarchy: lexical variability, causal language, and response length as linguistic proxies for depth. One could also consider Costa and Kallick's three levels, information gathering, processing, and application, as a pragmatic alternative, especially in educational and business settings where agency is too often mistaken for disruption.

Curiosity as Cognitive Engine

This is where curiosity enters, not as an affect, but as a mechanism. Gruber and Ranganath frame it as a motivated state triggered by the detection of an information gap, a dissonance between what is known and what ought to be known.

Curiosity, in this framing, is not a vague impulse but a precise cognitive engine calibrated to push the mind toward resolution. It mobilizes attention, sharpens focus, and privileges novelty over redundancy. As such, it is both efficient and relentless.

Liquin and Lombrozo further refined this account by introducing Explanation Seeking Curiosity (ESC), a particular mode of inquiry in which the individual does not merely wish to accumulate facts but seeks coherence, a principled explanation that fits into a broader mental model.

ESC is not satisfied by trivia; it demands a narrative, a mechanism, a why. This form of curiosity, especially when activated through self-generated questioning as seen in Kedrick's work, has been empirically shown to promote deeper engagement and enhance memory retention. In this way, curiosity serves as both the spark and the compass of inquiry, shaping not only what we ask, but how well we remember the answers.

Nowhere is this more vivid than in childhood. Ronfard and colleagues articulate the architecture of children’s questions in four components: initiation (recognition of missing knowledge), formulation (selecting what to ask), expression (contextual deployment), and evaluation (assessing the adequacy of the answer).

Developmental research shows that children evolve from simple hypothesis-scanning to sophisticated constraint-seeking, refining their questions to maximize return. But this refinement is not inevitable. It is conditional on social reinforcement, educational opportunity, and the absence of punitive silence.

In the classroom, questioning is both strategy and insurgency. King’s work on student-generated questioning shows that guided prompts improve retention, elaboration, and conceptual understanding. When students craft their own inquiries, especially with Bloom-level scaffolding, they build mental architectures of surprising resilience. Costa and Kallick extend this by linking question levels to metacognition and lifelong learning habits. The question becomes a lever, not only for learning content but for learning how to think.

AI and mutual bootstrapping

Which brings us, inexorably, to machines.

AI now learns to ask. More precisely, it learns to prompt. Prompt engineering, the art of crafting inputs that elicit optimal outputs from large language models, shares uncanny DNA with complex question-asking. Both require clarity, creativity, context awareness, and the intuition to anticipate response structures. Raz and Kenett hint at this parallel: the better we train humans to ask, the better we will train machines to respond, and, potentially, to ask in turn. But this mutual bootstrapping carries its own paradox. As humans become more adept at crafting precise prompts for AI, an act that reflects the formulation of well-structured questions, they hone their own epistemic strategies.

In turn, AI systems respond with increasingly sophisticated outputs, some of which model, even if imperfectly, the heuristics of inquiry. The more we train these models to ask and answer, the more we are forced to refine what we mean by a ‘good’ question. And yet, the machine’s question does not arise from anxiety or awe. It does not grieve its ignorance. We do. That is the irremediable difference.

In the social sphere, questions are double-edged. They open space for dialogue but also risk exposure. Raz and Kenett acknowledge that asking is a performance, situated, strategic, often constrained. To ask the right question at the wrong time is to become suspect. And so, societies teach not only what questions to ask, but when, how, and to whom. This is not pedagogy. It is control.

The tragedy is not that we lack good answers. It is that we have stopped cultivating the conditions for good questions. As Douglas Adams's book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy suggests, the question itself might be the problem. The QuInS framework, in all its empirical elegance, is a call to remember that thinking is not data processing. It is a willingness to dwell in doubt.

To ask well is to think well. To think well is to resist being governed by noise, certainty, or speed. And in an era increasingly allergic to ambiguity, the question remains our last form of dignity.

Stay curious

Colin

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I recommend this podcast of Professor Yoed Kenett: The Associations of the Creative Mind

This is a modified version of what originally started out as an academic paper:-)

References

Coenen, A., Nelson, J. D., & Gureckis, T. M. (2021). Asking the right questions about the psychology of human inquiry: Nine open challenges. Psychological Inquiry, 32(2), 103–118.

Costa, A., & Kallick, B. (2015). Five strategies for questioning with intention. Educational Leadership, 73(1), 66-69.

Flammer, A. (1981). Towards a theory of question asking. Psychological Research, 43(4), 407-420. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00309225

Floridi, L. (2011). The Philosophy of Information. Oxford University Press.

Gruber, M. J., & Ranganath, C. (2019). How curiosity enhances hippocampus-dependent memory: The prediction, appraisal, curiosity, and exploration (PACE) framework. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(12), 1014–1025.

Kearsley, G. P. (1976). Questions and question-asking in verbal discourse: A cross-disciplinary review. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 5(4), 355–375.

Kedrick, K., Schrater, P., & Koutstaal, W. (2023). The Multifaceted Role of Self-Generated Question Asking in Curiosity-Driven Learning. Cognitive Science, 47(4), e13253. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13253

King, A. (1994). Guiding knowledge construction in the classroom: Effects of teaching children how to question and how to explain. American Educational Research Journal, 31(2), 338–368.

Liquin, E. G., & Lombrozo, T. (2020). A functional approach to explanation-seeking curiosity. Cognitive Psychology, 119, 101276.

Marchionini, G. (1995). Information Seeking in Electronic Environments. Cambridge University Press.

Ram, A. (1991). A theory of questions and question asking. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 1(3-4), 273–318.

Ronfard, S., Zambrana, I. M., Hermansen, T. K., & Kelemen, D. (2018). Question-asking in childhood: A review of the literature and a framework for understanding development. Developmental Review, 49, 101–120.

Raz, T., & Kenett, Y. (2023). Questions in Information Seeking: A Primer.