Eliciting false insights with semantic priming

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 had a greater impact than visual similarity on false insights, although the combination of the two manipulations produced the strongest effect. These studies highlight the importance of misleading semantic processing in the generation of false insights.

A novel approach for modelling subsequent memory reports by separating decidedness, recognition and confidence

“…It is also in line with the vast literature on semantic priming and false memory effects in old age which are usually investigated using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (Akhtar et al, 2020;Evrard et al, 2016;Brod et al, 2013;Sweeney-Reed et al, 2012). Hypothetically, the negative effect of LC on MCA could be a hubris effect, explainable by semantic priming being able to elicit high-confidence false alarms (Grimmer et al, 2022;Laukkonen et al, 2020).…”

The ring of truth: Irrelevant insights make worldviews seem true

“…The level of support for the movement is hard to measure, but appears remarkably high given the bizarre nature of the claims (Shanahan, 2021). QAnon provides a potential real-life example of our findings in its demonstration that the way the mind constructs 'insights' is fallible (Grimmer et al, 2021), and yet these insights can incite real and sometimes dangerous behaviour.…”

The ring of truth: Irrelevant insights make worldviews seem true

“…The level of support for the movement is hard to measure, but appears remarkably high given the bizarre nature of the claims (Shanahan, 2021). QAnon provides a potential real-life example of our ndings in its demonstration that the way the mind constructs 'insights' is fallible (Grimmer et al, 2021), and yet these insights can incite real and sometimes dangerous behaviour.…”

“…Moving forward, we encourage a research program on the underlying mechanisms and predictors of false insights-circumstances and states of mind in which this usually adaptive heuristic may break down. A paradigm has recently been developed to experimentally elicit false insights (Grimmer et al, 2021), which could yield valuable data for understanding the development of delusions in clinical populations. Consider, for example, the case of John Nash, the Nobel Laureate and mathematician.…”