“Irrelevant Insights Make Worldviews Ring True”, Ruben E. Laukkonen, Benjamin T. Kaveladze, John Protzko, Jason M. Tangen, William von Hippel, Jonathan W. Schooler2022-02-08 (mind, religion, illusion-of-depth bias; backlinks)⁠:

Our basic beliefs about reality can be impossible to prove, and yet we can feel a strong intuitive conviction about them, as exemplified by insights that imbue an idea with immediate certainty.

Here we presented participants with worldview beliefs such as “people’s core qualities are fixed” and simultaneously elicited an aha moment.

In the first experiment (n = 3,000, which included a direct replication), participants rated worldview beliefs as truer when they solved anagrams and also experienced aha moments.

A second experiment (n = 1,564) showed that the worldview statement and the aha moment must be perceived simultaneously for this ‘insight misattribution’ effect to occur.

These results demonstrate that artificially induced aha moments can make worldview beliefs seem truer, possibly because humans partially 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.

…There is also more direct evidence that aha moments can affect decisions. For example, aha moments that occur when solving anagrams can facilitate false memories, where participants report having seen the word in a list even if they had not²⁶. Using a similar paradigm, another study showed that irrelevant aha moments can make mundane facts more believable^9,27. And finally, ideas accompanied by Aha! experiences are more likely to be remembered²⁸, and insights may make it harder to change one’s mind²².

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