When I find myself in the presence of a new very smart person, my favorite question to ask is,”What is the most interesting question in your field?”* It both makes for great conversation and expands my sense of the envelope of human inquiry.

If you have an idea about the most interesting question in your field, I’d love to hear about it in a comment below. If you are the kind of person who creates and publicizes websites, though, what I’d like even more is for you to create a wiki-style site where folks can go, create a forum for their field or sub-discipline, and propose and vote on most interesting questions. This could generate what I want to look at: a home page that is a self-updating outline of what professionals believe are the most interesting questions in their field. If you want to go whole-hog, you could also let them vote on and link to what they believe are the best pieces of research on their question to date.

And since I posed the question, I should probably tackle it for my own field… I am a couples and family therapist, and I propose that the most interesting question in my field is, “What are the precise mechanisms of therapeutic change in couple and family systems?” In other words, how does therapy work? We know that it is helpful in most cases, and we have endless models and speculations about how it works, but virtually no evidence about the mechanisms of change. The best research I know about on the topic is the qualitative, two-part, “What Clients of Couple Therapy Model Developers and Their Former Students Say About Change,” by Davis & Piercy. Edging into that territory from another angle is the research summarized in Gottman’s The Science of Trust.

*I stole this question from very-smart-person Ethan Mitchell.