Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Some ideas that we have feel mundane, but others are imbued with a sense of profundity. Here we tested the possibility that humans rely on feelings of insight in order to appraise their own ideas, the source of which is often hidden from conscious view. We began by investigating the recent finding that insight experiences predict objective problem solving performance. In Experiment 1, we measured insight experiences in real-time using a dynamometer, and found that impulsive feelings of insight (and their intensity) are strong predictors of accurate solutions to problems that typically involve implicit processing. In Experiment 2, we found that this insight-accuracy effect is also robust in a sensory identification task reminiscent of everyday life. In a third experiment, we presented participants with general knowledge ‘facts’ while eliciting insight experiences at the same time using anagrams. Participants reported greater perceived truth for facts accompanied by solved anagrams and particularly those that elicited insight experiences, even if the facts were false. Taken together, the results suggest that insight phenomenology usually contains useful information about the veracity of a solution, and that humans use this feeling heuristically to appraise new ideas. However, so-called Aha! moments can be overgeneralized, and bias truth judgments regarding a temporally coincident but otherwise irrelevant fact. We conclude by discussing potential side effects of relying on phenomenology to evaluate ideas, including false beliefs and dangerous ideologies.