ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2022
Eliciting false insights with semantic priming.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Unveiling the Aha! moment: A computational account of insight in active inference.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Aha! Ratings as Metacognitive Judgments.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- An Integrated theory of false insights and beliefs under psychedelics.Communications psychology · 2024Review
- Where Does Eureka Come From? The Effect of Unreportable Hints on the Phenomenology of Insight.Journal of Intelligence · 2022Article
- Irrelevant insights make worldviews ring true.Scientific reports · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.