The ring of truth: Irrelevant insights make worldviews seem true

Abstract

Our basic beliefs about reality can be impossible to prove and yet we can feel a strong intuitive conviction for them, as exemplified by insights that imbue an idea with immediate certainty. Here we presented participants with worldviews such as “people’s core qualities are fixed”, and simultaneously elicited an aha moment. In the first experiment (N = 3000), which included a direct replication, participants rated worldview beliefs as truer when they solved anagrams and experienced aha moments. A second experiment (N = 1,005) showed that the worldview statement and the aha moment must be perceived simultaneously for the insight misattribution effect to occur. These results demonstrate that artificially induced aha moments can make worldviews seem truer, possibly because humans rely on feelings of insight to appraise an idea’s veracity. Feelings of insight are therefore not epiphenomenal and should be investigated for their effects on decisions, beliefs, and delusions.