While we have mostly discussed Gestalt psychologists in the area of perception, many Gestalt concepts can be utilized in the domains of problem-solving, creativity, and insight, and from this perspective, such domains are strongly intertwined. Gestalt psychologists emphasize the Importance of Context for both perception and problem solving; unwarranted assumptions and unwarranted expectations often hinder our problem solving. We will return to examples of such barriers later in the context of functional fixedness and mental sets.

Further, the way that a person understands and organizes information provided in a problem or represents a problem often facilitates or hinders problem solving. If information is misunderstood, thought about, or used inappropriately, then mistakes are likely – if indeed the problem can be solved at all.

Insight

Insight is the apparent (conscious) sudden solution to a problem after the problem has been presented. For Gestalt Psychologist Max Wertheimer (1945), insight is the result of a rearrangement of problem elements (concepts).

There are two very different ways of approaching a goal-oriented situation. In one case an organism readily reproduces the response to the given problem from past experience. This is called reproductive thinking.

The second way requires something new and different to achieve the goal. Productive thinking goes beyond previously learned associations (Wertheimer, 1945). Such productive thinking is argued to involve insight.

Gestalt psychologists like Wertheimer (1945) believed that insight problems are a separate category of problems in their own right. Further, Gestalt psychologists emphasize that some of the most useful problem-solving on the path to success involves insight.

Köhler’s Insightful Theory of Creative Problem Solving

In 1913, Wolfgang Köhler (1887 – 1967) left Frankfurt, Germany for the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where he had been named the director of the Prussian Academy of Sciences anthropoid research station. He worked there for more than 5 years, during which time he wrote a book on problem-solving titled The Mentality of Apes (1925).

In this research, Köhler observed how chimpanzees solve problems, including some requiring environment manipulation and the use of tools. From this work, Köhler concluded that the chimps had not arrived at these methods through trial-and-error. Rather, the chimps had an insight in which, having realized the answer, they proceeded to carry it out in a way that was “unwaveringly purposeful” and unique (Köhler, 1925).

In one study, Kohler put a chimpanzee named Sultan inside a cage and a banana was hung from the roof of the cage. A box was placed inside the cage.  The chimpanzee tried to reach the banana by jumping but could not succeed.  Suddenly, he got an idea and used the stick as a jumping platform by placing it just below the hanging banana.

In another study, Kohler made this problem more difficult. Now it required two or three boxes to reach the bananas.  Moreover, the placing of one box over the other required different specific arrangements.

In a more complicated study, bananas were placed outside the cage of the chimpanzee. Two sticks, one larger than the other, were placed inside the cage. One was hollow at one end so that the other stick could be thrust into it to form a longer stick.

The bananas were kept outside the cage so they could not be picked up by one of the sticks. Sultan first tried these sticks one after the other but failed. Suddenly, he got a bright idea (a metaphorical light bulb according to Kohler). Sultan the chimp then joined the two sticks together and reached the banana.

In Kohler’s studies on the Canary Islands, he also studied many other chimpanzees. Interestingly, many other chimpanzees could solve the problems only when they saw Sultan solving them.

With evidence from such experiments, Kohler concluded that in the solution of problems, Sultan and the other chimp participants did not resort to blind trial-and–error. Kohler suggested the chimps solved their problems with “Insight.”

Below, find footage of the Kohler Chimp Insight Studies (6- min.)

Insight Problems & Testing the “Aha” experience

Tasks that might involve insight often have certain features: they need something new and non-obvious to be done and, in most cases, insight problems are difficult enough to predict that the initial solution attempt will be unsuccessful. When you solve a problem of this kind you often have a so-called “AHA-experience;” that is, it feels as though the solution suddenly appears.

To test insight empirically, Metcalfe and Wiebe (1987) presented insight and non-insight problems to participants who had four minutes to solve each problem. The dependent variable was that every 15 seconds, the participants would provide a rating of “warmth” for how close they believed they were to solving the problem, as well as an assessment of the likelihood of solving the problem.

The pattern of results was as Metcalfe and Wiebe (1987) predicted. For participants with non-insight problems, their ratings of warmth and likelihood of solving judgments often increased over time as they got “closer” to problem solution.

However, for the participants with insight problems, their ratings of warmth and likelihood of solving judgments were often low until just before they solved the problem. Presumably this pattern was due to the participants suddenly realizing the solution(“Aha”) just prior to solving the insight problem (Metcalfe and Wiebe, 1987).

So the results from Metcalfe and Wiebe (1987) support the following conclusions:

• There is a fundamental difference between insight and non-insight problems.
• Metacognition for non-insight problems are accurate and predictive of actual performance.
• Metacognition of insight problems is unrelated (or negatively related) to probability of solving the problem.
• Pattern of ratings of warmth during problem solving may be used to classify insight or non-insight problems.

So are sudden insight problems categorically different? It’s still hard to verify; with a greater deal of research literature to support a potential large role of the unconscious, there is some debate about whether insight is a special process. Perhaps all problems are solved incrementally, and we are just unaware of this relatively unconscious processing until the end result more consciously suddenly appears.

Some suggest the “Aha” experience is a subjective, phenomenological experience only and is just the end result of unconscious problem-solving processes percolating away. Then these unconscious problem-solving processes bubble up to the level of conscious awareness and experience.