# Step-Back Prompting

> Step-back prompting has the model first answer a more general, abstract question about the underlying principle, then use that answer to reason about the original specific question.

- Identifier: PTL-0032
- Category: Reasoning Elicitation
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/step-back-prompting/
- Also known as: abstraction prompting
- Introduced: 2023

## Description

For a physics question, the step-back question might ask which law applies. Zheng et al. reported gains on science, multi-hop, and knowledge-intensive question answering.

## Related terms

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://protologue.com/t/chain-of-thought/)
- [Generated Knowledge Prompting](https://protologue.com/t/generated-knowledge-prompting/)

## Sources

- Zheng et al. (2023). Take a Step Back: Evoking Reasoning via Abstraction in Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06117

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Step-Back Prompting. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0032). https://protologue.com/t/step-back-prompting/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)