Abstract
The insight experience (or ‘Aha moment’) generally evokes strong feelings of certainty and confidence. An ‘Aha’ experience for a false idea could underlie many false beliefs and delusions. However, for as long as insight experiences have been studied, false insights have remained difficult to elicit experimentally. That difficulty, in turn, highlights the fact that we know little about what causes people to experience a false insight. Across two experiments (total N = 300), we developed and tested a new paradigm to elicit false insights. In Experiment 1 we used a combination of semantic priming and visual similarity to elicit feelings of insight for incorrect solutions to anagrams. These false insights were relatively common but were experienced as weaker than correct ones. In Experiment 2 we replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and found that semantic priming and visual similarity interacted to produce false insights. These studies highlight the importance of misleading semantic processing and the feasibility of the solution in the generation of false insights.
Highlights
The ‘Aha’ experience is exciting, it is informative; people’s self-reported insights consistently signal the accuracy of their solutions (Danek et al, 2016; Danek & Wiley, 2017; Hedne et al, 2016; Salvi et al, 2016; Webb et al, 2016, 2018)
We computed the proportion of all trials for each anagram type with reported false insights as the number of incorrect anagram solutions accompanied by an ‘Aha’ moment divided by the number of trials for each anagram
A significant difference between the number of false insights elicited by each anagram type emerged, F(3,444) 171.52, p < .001, η2G =
Summary
The ‘Aha’ experience is exciting, it is informative; people’s self-reported insights consistently signal the accuracy of their solutions (Danek et al, 2016; Danek & Wiley, 2017; Hedne et al, 2016; Salvi et al, 2016; Webb et al, 2016, 2018). Despite the strength and reliability of this relationship, the feeling of insight does not guarantee that a solution will be correct. People have experienced ‘Aha’ moments for incorrect solutions (Danek et al, 2016; Danek & Wiley, 2017; Valueva et al, 2016; Webb et al, 2016). These so-called false insights are difficult to investigate because they have not been evoked experimentally. We introduce a new experimental paradigm to induce false insights and explore their origins
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
