A Naturalistic Study of Insight

Although insight is often invoked as a phenomenon of problem solving and innovation, it has rarely been studied in a naturalistic fashion. The purpose of the study reported here was to learn more about insights as they occur in field settings as opposed to controlled laboratory conditions. The authors collected a set of 120 examples of insight taken from cognitive task analysis interviews, media accounts, and other sources and coded each incident using a set of 14 features. The results generated a descriptive model of insight that is different from the findings that emerge from research with puzzle problems. It posits multiple pathways for gaining insights. One pathway is triggered by detecting a contradiction. A second pathway is triggered by a need to break through an impasse. The third pathway gets triggered by seeing a connection.