The Role of Asking More Complex Questions in Creative Thinking

Question asking has been a critical tool for teaching and learning since the time of Socrates and is important in the creative problem-solving process. Yet, its role in creativity has insofar not been thoroughly explored. The current study assessed the role of question asking in the creative process. A correlational preregistered design was used to administer the alternative questions task (AQT) to explore its relation to cognitive and creative divergent thinking tasks. In the AQT-which is based on Torrance's unusual questions task-participants are asked to generate creative and unusual questions for common objects. Responses are rated for their question level using the Bloom's taxonomy, a widely accepted guideline in designing examination questions of differing levels of complexity, as well as their subjective and objective creativity. A significant positive relation between AQT question level and objective and subjective creativity scores was found: Higher, more complex questions were more creative, with the inverse effect for lower-level questions. We interpret these findings as supporting the hypothesis that higher question complexity is related and predictive of creative ability. A second study replicated and generalized our findings. Thus, our findings uniquely highlight the role of question asking, and especially question complexity, in creativity.