False insights—moments of sudden, incorrect understanding—can be triggered in anyone under the right conditions, not just people prone to psychosis or delusional thinking. In an experiment with 200 participants who completed an adapted version of the FIAT paradigm, which elicits false 'Aha' moments for unsolvable anagrams, no association was found between these experimentally induced false insights and measures of schizotypy, need for cognition, jumping to conclusions, aberrant salience, faith in intuition, or cognitive reflection. The findings suggest that experiencing false insights may be a general human phenomenon rather than a marker of particular thinking styles or psychosis proneness.
In a preregistered experiment, participants solved problems while squeezing a dynamometer to capture real-time feelings of insight. A strong positive relationship emerged between Aha moments and accuracy for problems requiring implicit processing. The intensity of the insight experience further predicted solution accuracy, and participants unintentionally embodied this intensity by squeezing the dynamometer more tightly, which also predicted accuracy. The authors argue that the dynamometer captures both process and feeling simultaneously, measures Aha moments on a continuum, and shows that the feeling of Aha carries information about an idea's veracity. Findings are discussed in light of a theoretical account where feelings of insight act as a heuristic for selecting ideas from consciousness.