Science is littered with stories of 鈥淓ureka!鈥� or 鈥淎ha!鈥� moments 鈥� the sudden realisation of a great truth. But it turns out that these flashes of inspiration may sometimes lead us astray.
Ruben Laukkonen at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and his colleagues asked 300 people to look at a series of statements and decide, on a 12-point scale, how certain they felt about whether the statement was true or not.
The team split the participants into three equal groups, giving each a slightly different version of the task.
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The first group had to solve an anagram to reveal one of the words in each statement. For example, 鈥淭here are more than 100,000 craters on the nomo鈥� (moon) or 鈥渋thlium (lithium) is the lightest of all metals鈥�.
The idea was to engineer a Eureka moment amongst participants, and people reported experiencing such a breakthrough 39 per cent of the time.
The second group were presented plain statements, without an anagram, and the final group were presented the statements but with the a word withheld for 15 seconds, roughly the amount of time it took for the others to solve the anagram.
Participants who had a Eureka moment after solving an anagram rated the statements 7 per cent higher on the 12-point truth scale, regardless of whether the statement was actually true or not.
鈥淲hen you consider that this was driven by something as trivial as an anagram, the effect of a genuine Aha! moment on truth judgements is likely to be much stronger,鈥� says Laukonnen.
He speculates that it might underlie some of the effectiveness of fake news. 鈥淎 well-crafted narrative sprinkled with fake evidence could set the reader up to experience an Aha! moment,鈥� says Laukonnen. 鈥淭he Aha! moment may be true in the context of the article, but false because the content of the article itself is false.鈥�
鈥淯ltimately the hope is that if we understand the nature of Eureka moments we can use them more effectively鈥� he says.
Gerd Gigerenzer at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development says that while the results are interesting, he still doesn鈥檛 see a reason to distrust Eureka moments. He says social psychologists have 鈥渁 bias for looking for biases鈥� and that the results may not stand up to scrutiny.
Cognition
