4 stages of problem solving psychology

Psychological Steps Involved in Problem Solving

A mental process or a phenomenon dedicated towards solving problems by discovering and analyzing the problem is referred to as problem-solving. It is a process dedicated to finding not just any solution, but the best solution to resolve any problems. There is no such thing as one best way to solve every kind of problem, since there are unique problems depending upon the situation there are unique solutions too.

In psychology, problem solving doesn’t necessarily refer to solving psychological/mental issues of the brain. The process simply refers to solving every kind of problems in life in a proper manner. The idea of including the subject in psychology is because psychology deals with the overall mental process. And, tactfully using our thought process is what leads to the solution of any problems.

There are number of rigid psychological steps involved in problem solving, which is also referred as problem-solving cycle. The steps are in sequential order, and solving any problem requires following them one after another. But, we tend to avoid following this rigid set of steps, which is why it often requires us to go through the same steps over and over again until a satisfactory solution is reached.

Here are the steps involved in problem solving, approved by expert psychologists.

1. Identifying the Problem

Identifying the problem seems like the obvious first stem, but it’s not exactly as simple as it sounds. People might identify the wrong source of a problem, which will render the steps thus carried on useless.

For instance , let’s say you’re having trouble with your studies. identifying the root of your failure is your first priority. The problem here could be that you haven’t been allocating enough time for your studies, or you haven’t tried the right techniques. But, if you make an assumption that the problem here is the subject being too hard, you won’t be able to solve the problem.

2. Defining/Understanding the Problem

It’s vital to properly define the problem once it’s been identified. Only by defining the problem, further steps can be taken to solve it. While at it, you also need to take into consideration different perspectives to understand any problem; this will also help you look for solutions with different perspectives.

Now, following up with the previous example . Let’s say you have identified the problem as not being able to allocate enough time for your studies. You need to sort out the reason behind it. Have you just been procrastinating? Have you been too busy with work? You need to understand the whole problem and reasons behind it, which is the second step in problem solving.

3. Forming a Strategy

Developing a strategy is the next step to finding a solution. Each different situation will require formulating different strategies, also depending on individual’s unique preferences.

Now, you have identified and studied your problem. You can’t just simply jump into trying to solve it. You can’t just quit work and start studying. You need to draw up a strategy to manage your time properly. Allocate less time for not-so-important works, and add them to your study time. Your strategy should be well thought, so that in theory at least, you are able to manage enough time to study properly and not fail in the exams.

4. Organizing Information

Organizing the available information is another crucial step to the process. You need to consider

• What do you know about the problem?
• What do you not know about the problem?

Accuracy of the solution for your problem will depend on the amount of information available.

The hypothetical strategy you formulate isn’t the all of it either. You need to now contemplate on the information available on the subject matter. Use the aforementioned questions to find out more about the problem. Proper organization of the information will force you to revise your strategy and refine it for best results.

5. Allocating Resources

Time, money and other resources aren’t unlimited. Deciding how high the priority is to solve your problem will help you determine the resources you’ll be using in your course to find the solution. If the problem is important, you can allocate more resources to solving it. However, if the problem isn’t as important, it’s not worth the time and money you might spend on it if not for proper planning.

For instance , let’s consider a different scenario where your business deal is stuck, but it’s few thousand miles away. Now, you need to analyze the problem and the resources you can afford to expend to solve the particular problem. If the deal isn’t really in your favor, you could just try solving it over the phone, however, more important deals might require you to fly to the location in order to solve the issue.

6. Monitoring Progress

You need to document your progress as you are finding a solution. Don’t rely on your memory, no matter how good your memory is. Effective problem-solvers have been known to monitor their progress regularly. And, if they’re not making as much progress as they’re supposed to, they will reevaluate their approach or look for new strategies.

Problem solving isn’t an overnight feat. You can’t just have a body like that of Brad Pitt after a single session in the gym. It takes time and patience. Likewise, you need to work towards solving any problem every day until you finally achieve the results. Looking back at the previous example , if everything’s according to plan, you will be allocating more and more time for your studies until finally you are confident that you’re improving. One way to make sure that you’re on a right path to solving a problem is by keeping track of the progress. To solve the problem illustrated in the first example, you can take self-tests every week or two and track your progress.

7. Evaluating the Results

Your job still isn’t done even if you’ve reached a solution. You need to evaluate the solution to find out if it’s the best possible solution to the problem. The evaluation might be immediate or might take a while. For instance , answer to a math problem can be checked then and there, however solution to your yearly tax issue might not be possible to be evaluated right there.

• Take time to identify the possible sources of the problem. It’s better to spend a substantial amount of time on something right, than on something completely opposite.
• Ask yourself questions like What, Why, How to figure out the causes of the problem. Only then can you move forward on solving it.
• Carefully outline the methods to tackle the problem. There might be different solutions to a problem, record them all.
• Gather all information about the problem and the approaches. More, the merrier.
• From the outlined methods, choose the ones that are viable to approach. Try discarding the ones that have unseen consequences.
• Track your progress as you go.
• Evaluate the outcome of the progress.

What are other people reading?

Divergent Thinking

Convergent Thinking

Convergent Vs Divergent Thinking

7.3 Problem-Solving

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe problem solving strategies
• Define algorithm and heuristic
• Explain some common roadblocks to effective problem solving

   People face problems every day—usually, multiple problems throughout the day. Sometimes these problems are straightforward: To double a recipe for pizza dough, for example, all that is required is that each ingredient in the recipe be doubled. Sometimes, however, the problems we encounter are more complex. For example, say you have a work deadline, and you must mail a printed copy of a report to your supervisor by the end of the business day. The report is time-sensitive and must be sent overnight. You finished the report last night, but your printer will not work today. What should you do? First, you need to identify the problem and then apply a strategy for solving the problem.

The study of human and animal problem solving processes has provided much insight toward the understanding of our conscious experience and led to advancements in computer science and artificial intelligence. Essentially much of cognitive science today represents studies of how we consciously and unconsciously make decisions and solve problems. For instance, when encountered with a large amount of information, how do we go about making decisions about the most efficient way of sorting and analyzing all the information in order to find what you are looking for as in visual search paradigms in cognitive psychology. Or in a situation where a piece of machinery is not working properly, how do we go about organizing how to address the issue and understand what the cause of the problem might be. How do we sort the procedures that will be needed and focus attention on what is important in order to solve problems efficiently. Within this section we will discuss some of these issues and examine processes related to human, animal and computer problem solving.

PROBLEM-SOLVING STRATEGIES

   When people are presented with a problem—whether it is a complex mathematical problem or a broken printer, how do you solve it? Before finding a solution to the problem, the problem must first be clearly identified. After that, one of many problem solving strategies can be applied, hopefully resulting in a solution.

Problems themselves can be classified into two different categories known as ill-defined and well-defined problems (Schacter, 2009). Ill-defined problems represent issues that do not have clear goals, solution paths, or expected solutions whereas well-defined problems have specific goals, clearly defined solutions, and clear expected solutions. Problem solving often incorporates pragmatics (logical reasoning) and semantics (interpretation of meanings behind the problem), and also in many cases require abstract thinking and creativity in order to find novel solutions. Within psychology, problem solving refers to a motivational drive for reading a definite “goal” from a present situation or condition that is either not moving toward that goal, is distant from it, or requires more complex logical analysis for finding a missing description of conditions or steps toward that goal. Processes relating to problem solving include problem finding also known as problem analysis, problem shaping where the organization of the problem occurs, generating alternative strategies, implementation of attempted solutions, and verification of the selected solution. Various methods of studying problem solving exist within the field of psychology including introspection, behavior analysis and behaviorism, simulation, computer modeling, and experimentation.

A problem-solving strategy is a plan of action used to find a solution. Different strategies have different action plans associated with them (table below). For example, a well-known strategy is trial and error. The old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” describes trial and error. In terms of your broken printer, you could try checking the ink levels, and if that doesn’t work, you could check to make sure the paper tray isn’t jammed. Or maybe the printer isn’t actually connected to your laptop. When using trial and error, you would continue to try different solutions until you solved your problem. Although trial and error is not typically one of the most time-efficient strategies, it is a commonly used one.

   Another type of strategy is an algorithm. An algorithm is a problem-solving formula that provides you with step-by-step instructions used to achieve a desired outcome (Kahneman, 2011). You can think of an algorithm as a recipe with highly detailed instructions that produce the same result every time they are performed. Algorithms are used frequently in our everyday lives, especially in computer science. When you run a search on the Internet, search engines like Google use algorithms to decide which entries will appear first in your list of results. Facebook also uses algorithms to decide which posts to display on your newsfeed. Can you identify other situations in which algorithms are used?

A heuristic is another type of problem solving strategy. While an algorithm must be followed exactly to produce a correct result, a heuristic is a general problem-solving framework (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). You can think of these as mental shortcuts that are used to solve problems. A “rule of thumb” is an example of a heuristic. Such a rule saves the person time and energy when making a decision, but despite its time-saving characteristics, it is not always the best method for making a rational decision. Different types of heuristics are used in different types of situations, but the impulse to use a heuristic occurs when one of five conditions is met (Pratkanis, 1989):

• When one is faced with too much information
• When the time to make a decision is limited
• When the decision to be made is unimportant
• When there is access to very little information to use in making the decision
• When an appropriate heuristic happens to come to mind in the same moment

Working backwards is a useful heuristic in which you begin solving the problem by focusing on the end result. Consider this example: You live in Washington, D.C. and have been invited to a wedding at 4 PM on Saturday in Philadelphia. Knowing that Interstate 95 tends to back up any day of the week, you need to plan your route and time your departure accordingly. If you want to be at the wedding service by 3:30 PM, and it takes 2.5 hours to get to Philadelphia without traffic, what time should you leave your house? You use the working backwards heuristic to plan the events of your day on a regular basis, probably without even thinking about it.

Another useful heuristic is the practice of accomplishing a large goal or task by breaking it into a series of smaller steps. Students often use this common method to complete a large research project or long essay for school. For example, students typically brainstorm, develop a thesis or main topic, research the chosen topic, organize their information into an outline, write a rough draft, revise and edit the rough draft, develop a final draft, organize the references list, and proofread their work before turning in the project. The large task becomes less overwhelming when it is broken down into a series of small steps.

Further problem solving strategies have been identified (listed below) that incorporate flexible and creative thinking in order to reach solutions efficiently.

Additional Problem Solving Strategies :

• Abstraction – refers to solving the problem within a model of the situation before applying it to reality.
• Analogy – is using a solution that solves a similar problem.
• Brainstorming – refers to collecting an analyzing a large amount of solutions, especially within a group of people, to combine the solutions and developing them until an optimal solution is reached.
• Divide and conquer – breaking down large complex problems into smaller more manageable problems.
• Hypothesis testing – method used in experimentation where an assumption about what would happen in response to manipulating an independent variable is made, and analysis of the affects of the manipulation are made and compared to the original hypothesis.
• Lateral thinking – approaching problems indirectly and creatively by viewing the problem in a new and unusual light.
• Means-ends analysis – choosing and analyzing an action at a series of smaller steps to move closer to the goal.
• Method of focal objects – putting seemingly non-matching characteristics of different procedures together to make something new that will get you closer to the goal.
• Morphological analysis – analyzing the outputs of and interactions of many pieces that together make up a whole system.
• Proof – trying to prove that a problem cannot be solved. Where the proof fails becomes the starting point or solving the problem.
• Reduction – adapting the problem to be as similar problems where a solution exists.
• Research – using existing knowledge or solutions to similar problems to solve the problem.
• Root cause analysis – trying to identify the cause of the problem.

The strategies listed above outline a short summary of methods we use in working toward solutions and also demonstrate how the mind works when being faced with barriers preventing goals to be reached.

One example of means-end analysis can be found by using the Tower of Hanoi paradigm . This paradigm can be modeled as a word problems as demonstrated by the Missionary-Cannibal Problem :

Missionary-Cannibal Problem

Three missionaries and three cannibals are on one side of a river and need to cross to the other side. The only means of crossing is a boat, and the boat can only hold two people at a time. Your goal is to devise a set of moves that will transport all six of the people across the river, being in mind the following constraint: The number of cannibals can never exceed the number of missionaries in any location. Remember that someone will have to also row that boat back across each time.

Hint : At one point in your solution, you will have to send more people back to the original side than you just sent to the destination.

The actual Tower of Hanoi problem consists of three rods sitting vertically on a base with a number of disks of different sizes that can slide onto any rod. The puzzle starts with the disks in a neat stack in ascending order of size on one rod, the smallest at the top making a conical shape. The objective of the puzzle is to move the entire stack to another rod obeying the following rules:

• 1. Only one disk can be moved at a time.
• 2. Each move consists of taking the upper disk from one of the stacks and placing it on top of another stack or on an empty rod.
• 3. No disc may be placed on top of a smaller disk.

  Figure 7.02. Steps for solving the Tower of Hanoi in the minimum number of moves when there are 3 disks.

Figure 7.03. Graphical representation of nodes (circles) and moves (lines) of Tower of Hanoi.

The Tower of Hanoi is a frequently used psychological technique to study problem solving and procedure analysis. A variation of the Tower of Hanoi known as the Tower of London has been developed which has been an important tool in the neuropsychological diagnosis of executive function disorders and their treatment.

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY AND PROBLEM SOLVING

As you may recall from the sensation and perception chapter, Gestalt psychology describes whole patterns, forms and configurations of perception and cognition such as closure, good continuation, and figure-ground. In addition to patterns of perception, Wolfgang Kohler, a German Gestalt psychologist traveled to the Spanish island of Tenerife in order to study animals behavior and problem solving in the anthropoid ape.

As an interesting side note to Kohler’s studies of chimp problem solving, Dr. Ronald Ley, professor of psychology at State University of New York provides evidence in his book A Whisper of Espionage  (1990) suggesting that while collecting data for what would later be his book  The Mentality of Apes (1925) on Tenerife in the Canary Islands between 1914 and 1920, Kohler was additionally an active spy for the German government alerting Germany to ships that were sailing around the Canary Islands. Ley suggests his investigations in England, Germany and elsewhere in Europe confirm that Kohler had served in the German military by building, maintaining and operating a concealed radio that contributed to Germany’s war effort acting as a strategic outpost in the Canary Islands that could monitor naval military activity approaching the north African coast.

While trapped on the island over the course of World War 1, Kohler applied Gestalt principles to animal perception in order to understand how they solve problems. He recognized that the apes on the islands also perceive relations between stimuli and the environment in Gestalt patterns and understand these patterns as wholes as opposed to pieces that make up a whole. Kohler based his theories of animal intelligence on the ability to understand relations between stimuli, and spent much of his time while trapped on the island investigation what he described as  insight , the sudden perception of useful or proper relations. In order to study insight in animals, Kohler would present problems to chimpanzee’s by hanging some banana’s or some kind of food so it was suspended higher than the apes could reach. Within the room, Kohler would arrange a variety of boxes, sticks or other tools the chimpanzees could use by combining in patterns or organizing in a way that would allow them to obtain the food (Kohler & Winter, 1925).

While viewing the chimpanzee’s, Kohler noticed one chimp that was more efficient at solving problems than some of the others. The chimp, named Sultan, was able to use long poles to reach through bars and organize objects in specific patterns to obtain food or other desirables that were originally out of reach. In order to study insight within these chimps, Kohler would remove objects from the room to systematically make the food more difficult to obtain. As the story goes, after removing many of the objects Sultan was used to using to obtain the food, he sat down ad sulked for a while, and then suddenly got up going over to two poles lying on the ground. Without hesitation Sultan put one pole inside the end of the other creating a longer pole that he could use to obtain the food demonstrating an ideal example of what Kohler described as insight. In another situation, Sultan discovered how to stand on a box to reach a banana that was suspended from the rafters illustrating Sultan’s perception of relations and the importance of insight in problem solving.

Grande (another chimp in the group studied by Kohler) builds a three-box structure to reach the bananas, while Sultan watches from the ground.  Insight , sometimes referred to as an “Ah-ha” experience, was the term Kohler used for the sudden perception of useful relations among objects during problem solving (Kohler, 1927; Radvansky & Ashcraft, 2013).

Solving puzzles.

   Problem-solving abilities can improve with practice. Many people challenge themselves every day with puzzles and other mental exercises to sharpen their problem-solving skills. Sudoku puzzles appear daily in most newspapers. Typically, a sudoku puzzle is a 9×9 grid. The simple sudoku below (see figure) is a 4×4 grid. To solve the puzzle, fill in the empty boxes with a single digit: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Here are the rules: The numbers must total 10 in each bolded box, each row, and each column; however, each digit can only appear once in a bolded box, row, and column. Time yourself as you solve this puzzle and compare your time with a classmate.

How long did it take you to solve this sudoku puzzle? (You can see the answer at the end of this section.)

   Here is another popular type of puzzle (figure below) that challenges your spatial reasoning skills. Connect all nine dots with four connecting straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper:

Did you figure it out? (The answer is at the end of this section.) Once you understand how to crack this puzzle, you won’t forget.

   Take a look at the “Puzzling Scales” logic puzzle below (figure below). Sam Loyd, a well-known puzzle master, created and refined countless puzzles throughout his lifetime (Cyclopedia of Puzzles, n.d.).

What steps did you take to solve this puzzle? You can read the solution at the end of this section.

Pitfalls to problem solving.

   Not all problems are successfully solved, however. What challenges stop us from successfully solving a problem? Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Imagine a person in a room that has four doorways. One doorway that has always been open in the past is now locked. The person, accustomed to exiting the room by that particular doorway, keeps trying to get out through the same doorway even though the other three doorways are open. The person is stuck—but she just needs to go to another doorway, instead of trying to get out through the locked doorway. A mental set is where you persist in approaching a problem in a way that has worked in the past but is clearly not working now.

Functional fixedness is a type of mental set where you cannot perceive an object being used for something other than what it was designed for. During the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, NASA engineers at Mission Control had to overcome functional fixedness to save the lives of the astronauts aboard the spacecraft. An explosion in a module of the spacecraft damaged multiple systems. The astronauts were in danger of being poisoned by rising levels of carbon dioxide because of problems with the carbon dioxide filters. The engineers found a way for the astronauts to use spare plastic bags, tape, and air hoses to create a makeshift air filter, which saved the lives of the astronauts.

   Researchers have investigated whether functional fixedness is affected by culture. In one experiment, individuals from the Shuar group in Ecuador were asked to use an object for a purpose other than that for which the object was originally intended. For example, the participants were told a story about a bear and a rabbit that were separated by a river and asked to select among various objects, including a spoon, a cup, erasers, and so on, to help the animals. The spoon was the only object long enough to span the imaginary river, but if the spoon was presented in a way that reflected its normal usage, it took participants longer to choose the spoon to solve the problem. (German & Barrett, 2005). The researchers wanted to know if exposure to highly specialized tools, as occurs with individuals in industrialized nations, affects their ability to transcend functional fixedness. It was determined that functional fixedness is experienced in both industrialized and nonindustrialized cultures (German & Barrett, 2005).

In order to make good decisions, we use our knowledge and our reasoning. Often, this knowledge and reasoning is sound and solid. Sometimes, however, we are swayed by biases or by others manipulating a situation. For example, let’s say you and three friends wanted to rent a house and had a combined target budget of $1,600. The realtor shows you only very run-down houses for $1,600 and then shows you a very nice house for $2,000. Might you ask each person to pay more in rent to get the $2,000 home? Why would the realtor show you the run-down houses and the nice house? The realtor may be challenging your anchoring bias. An anchoring bias occurs when you focus on one piece of information when making a decision or solving a problem. In this case, you’re so focused on the amount of money you are willing to spend that you may not recognize what kinds of houses are available at that price point.

The confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on information that confirms your existing beliefs. For example, if you think that your professor is not very nice, you notice all of the instances of rude behavior exhibited by the professor while ignoring the countless pleasant interactions he is involved in on a daily basis. Hindsight bias leads you to believe that the event you just experienced was predictable, even though it really wasn’t. In other words, you knew all along that things would turn out the way they did. Representative bias describes a faulty way of thinking, in which you unintentionally stereotype someone or something; for example, you may assume that your professors spend their free time reading books and engaging in intellectual conversation, because the idea of them spending their time playing volleyball or visiting an amusement park does not fit in with your stereotypes of professors.

Finally, the availability heuristic is a heuristic in which you make a decision based on an example, information, or recent experience that is that readily available to you, even though it may not be the best example to inform your decision . Biases tend to “preserve that which is already established—to maintain our preexisting knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and hypotheses” (Aronson, 1995; Kahneman, 2011). These biases are summarized in the table below.

Were you able to determine how many marbles are needed to balance the scales in the figure below? You need nine. Were you able to solve the problems in the figures above? Here are the answers.

   Many different strategies exist for solving problems. Typical strategies include trial and error, applying algorithms, and using heuristics. To solve a large, complicated problem, it often helps to break the problem into smaller steps that can be accomplished individually, leading to an overall solution. Roadblocks to problem solving include a mental set, functional fixedness, and various biases that can cloud decision making skills.

References:

Openstax Psychology text by Kathryn Dumper, William Jenkins, Arlene Lacombe, Marilyn Lovett and Marion Perlmutter licensed under CC BY v4.0. https://openstax.org/details/books/psychology

Review Questions:

1. A specific formula for solving a problem is called ________.

a. an algorithm

b. a heuristic

c. a mental set

d. trial and error

2. Solving the Tower of Hanoi problem tends to utilize a  ________ strategy of problem solving.

a. divide and conquer

b. means-end analysis

d. experiment

3. A mental shortcut in the form of a general problem-solving framework is called ________.

4. Which type of bias involves becoming fixated on a single trait of a problem?

a. anchoring bias

b. confirmation bias

c. representative bias

d. availability bias

5. Which type of bias involves relying on a false stereotype to make a decision?

6. Wolfgang Kohler analyzed behavior of chimpanzees by applying Gestalt principles to describe ________.

a. social adjustment

b. student load payment options

c. emotional learning

d. insight learning

7. ________ is a type of mental set where you cannot perceive an object being used for something other than what it was designed for.

a. functional fixedness

c. working memory

Critical Thinking Questions:

1. What is functional fixedness and how can overcoming it help you solve problems?

2. How does an algorithm save you time and energy when solving a problem?

Personal Application Question:

1. Which type of bias do you recognize in your own decision making processes? How has this bias affected how you’ve made decisions in the past and how can you use your awareness of it to improve your decisions making skills in the future?

anchoring bias

availability heuristic

confirmation bias

functional fixedness

hindsight bias

problem-solving strategy

representative bias

trial and error

working backwards

Answers to Exercises

algorithm:  problem-solving strategy characterized by a specific set of instructions

anchoring bias:  faulty heuristic in which you fixate on a single aspect of a problem to find a solution

availability heuristic:  faulty heuristic in which you make a decision based on information readily available to you

confirmation bias:  faulty heuristic in which you focus on information that confirms your beliefs

functional fixedness:  inability to see an object as useful for any other use other than the one for which it was intended

heuristic:  mental shortcut that saves time when solving a problem

hindsight bias:  belief that the event just experienced was predictable, even though it really wasn’t

mental set:  continually using an old solution to a problem without results

problem-solving strategy:  method for solving problems

representative bias:  faulty heuristic in which you stereotype someone or something without a valid basis for your judgment

trial and error:  problem-solving strategy in which multiple solutions are attempted until the correct one is found

working backwards:  heuristic in which you begin to solve a problem by focusing on the end result

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4 Main problem-solving strategies

In Psychology, you get to read about a ton of therapies. It’s mind-boggling how different theorists have looked at human nature differently and have come up with different, often somewhat contradictory, theoretical approaches.

Yet, you can’t deny the kernel of truth that’s there in all of them. All therapies, despite being different, have one thing in common- they all aim to solve people’s problems. They all aim to equip people with problem-solving strategies to help them deal with their life problems.

Problem-solving is really at the core of everything we do. Throughout our lives, we’re constantly trying to solve one problem or another. When we can’t, all sorts of psychological problems take hold. Getting good at solving problems is a fundamental life skill.

Problem-solving stages

What problem-solving does is take you from an initial state (A) where a problem exists to a final or goal state (B), where the problem no longer exists.

To move from A to B, you need to perform some actions called operators. Engaging in the right operators moves you from A to B. So, the stages of problem-solving are:

• Initial state

The problem itself can either be well-defined or ill-defined. A well-defined problem is one where you can clearly see where you are (A), where you want to go (B), and what you need to do to get there (engaging the right operators).

For example, feeling hungry and wanting to eat can be seen as a problem, albeit a simple one for many. Your initial state is hunger (A) and your final state is satisfaction or no hunger (B). Going to the kitchen and finding something to eat is using the right operator.

In contrast, ill-defined or complex problems are those where one or more of the three problem solving stages aren’t clear. For example, if your goal is to bring about world peace, what is it exactly that you want to do?

It’s been rightly said that a problem well-defined is a problem half-solved. Whenever you face an ill-defined problem, the first thing you need to do is get clear about all the three stages.

Often, people will have a decent idea of where they are (A) and where they want to be (B). What they usually get stuck on is finding the right operators.

Initial theory in problem-solving

When people first attempt to solve a problem, i.e. when they first engage their operators, they often have an initial theory of solving the problem. As I mentioned in my article on overcoming challenges for complex problems, this initial theory is often wrong.

But, at the time, it’s usually the result of the best information the individual can gather about the problem. When this initial theory fails, the problem-solver gets more data, and he refines the theory. Eventually, he finds an actual theory i.e. a theory that works. This finally allows him to engage the right operators to move from A to B.

Problem-solving strategies

These are operators that a problem solver tries to move from A to B. There are several problem-solving strategies but the main ones are:

• Trial and error

1. Algorithms

When you follow a step-by-step procedure to solve a problem or reach a goal, you’re using an algorithm. If you follow the steps exactly, you’re guaranteed to find the solution. The drawback of this strategy is that it can get cumbersome and time-consuming for large problems.

Say I hand you a 200-page book and ask you to read out to me what’s written on page 100. If you start from page 1 and keep turning the pages, you’ll eventually reach page 100. There’s no question about it. But the process is time-consuming. So instead you use what’s called a heuristic.

2. Heuristics

Heuristics are rules of thumb that people use to simplify problems. They’re often based on memories from past experiences. They cut down the number of steps needed to solve a problem, but they don’t always guarantee a solution. Heuristics save us time and effort if they work.

You know that page 100 lies in the middle of the book. Instead of starting from page one, you try to open the book in the middle. Of course, you may not hit page 100, but you can get really close with just a couple of tries.

If you open page 90, for instance, you can then algorithmically move from 90 to 100. Thus, you can use a combination of heuristics and algorithms to solve the problem. In real life, we often solve problems like this.

When police are looking for suspects in an investigation, they try to narrow down the problem similarly. Knowing the suspect is 6 feet tall isn’t enough, as there could be thousands of people out there with that height.

Knowing the suspect is 6 feet tall, male, wears glasses, and has blond hair narrows down the problem significantly.

3. Trial and error

When you have an initial theory to solve a problem, you try it out. If you fail, you refine or change your theory and try again. This is the trial-and-error process of solving problems. Behavioral and cognitive trial and error often go hand in hand, but for many problems, we start with behavioural trial and error until we’re forced to think.

Say you’re in a maze, trying to find your way out. You try one route without giving it much thought and you find it leads to nowhere. Then you try another route and fail again. This is behavioural trial and error because you aren’t putting any thought into your trials. You’re just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.

This isn’t an ideal strategy but can be useful in situations where it’s impossible to get any information about the problem without doing some trials.

Then, when you have enough information about the problem, you shuffle that information in your mind to find a solution. This is cognitive trial and error or analytical thinking. Behavioral trial and error can take a lot of time, so using cognitive trial and error as much as possible is advisable. You got to sharpen your axe before you cut the tree.

When solving complex problems, people get frustrated after having tried several operators that didn’t work. They abandon their problem and go on with their routine activities. Suddenly, they get a flash of insight that makes them confident they can now solve the problem.

I’ve done an entire article on the underlying mechanics of insight . Long story short, when you take a step back from your problem, it helps you see things in a new light. You make use of associations that were previously unavailable to you.

You get more puzzle pieces to work with and this increases the odds of you finding a path from A to B, i.e. finding operators that work.

Pilot problem-solving

No matter what problem-solving strategy you employ, it’s all about finding out what works. Your actual theory tells you what operators will take you from A to B. Complex problems don’t reveal their actual theories easily solely because they are complex.

Therefore, the first step to solving a complex problem is getting as clear as you can about what you’re trying to accomplish- collecting as much information as you can about the problem.

This gives you enough raw materials to formulate an initial theory. We want our initial theory to be as close to an actual theory as possible. This saves time and resources.

Solving a complex problem can mean investing a lot of resources. Therefore, it is recommended you verify your initial theory if you can. I call this pilot problem-solving.

Before businesses invest in making a product, they sometimes distribute free versions to a small sample of potential customers to ensure their target audience will be receptive to the product.

Before making a series of TV episodes, TV show producers often release pilot episodes to figure out whether the show can take off.

Before conducting a large study, researchers do a pilot study to survey a small sample of the population to determine if the study is worth carrying out.

The same ‘testing the waters’ approach needs to be applied to solving any complex problem you might be facing. Is your problem worth investing a lot of resources in? In management, we’re constantly taught about Return On Investment (ROI). The ROI should justify the investment.

If the answer is yes, go ahead and formulate your initial theory based on extensive research. Find a way to verify your initial theory. You need this reassurance that you’re going in the right direction, especially for complex problems that take a long time to solve.

Getting your causal thinking right

Problem solving boils down to getting your causal thinking right. Finding solutions is all about finding out what works, i.e. finding operators that take you from A to B. To succeed, you need to be confident in your initial theory (If I do X and Y, they’ll lead me to B). You need to be sure that doing X and Y will lead you to B- doing X and Y will cause B.

All obstacles to problem-solving or goal-accomplishing are rooted in faulty causal thinking leading to not engaging the right operators. When your causal thinking is on point, you’ll have no problem engaging the right operators.

As you can imagine, for complex problems, getting our causal thinking right isn’t easy. That’s why we need to formulate an initial theory and refine it over time.

I like to think of problem-solving as the ability to project the present into the past or into the future. When you’re solving problems, you’re basically looking at your present situation and asking yourself two questions:

“What caused this?” (Projecting present into the past)

“What will this cause?” (Projecting present into the future)

The first question is more relevant to problem-solving and the second to goal-accomplishing.

If you find yourself in a mess , you need to answer the “What caused this?” question correctly. For the operators you’re currently engaging to reach your goal, ask yourself, “What will this cause?” If you think they cannot cause B, it’s time to refine your initial theory.

Hi, I’m Hanan Parvez (MA Psychology). I’ve published over 500 articles and authored one book. My work has been featured in Forbes , Business Insider , Reader’s Digest , and Entrepreneur .

Definition:

Problem Solving is the process of identifying, analyzing, and finding effective solutions to complex issues or challenges.

Key Steps in Problem Solving:

• Identification of the problem: Recognizing and clearly defining the issue that needs to be resolved.
• Analysis and research: Gathering relevant information, data, and facts to understand the problem in-depth.
• Formulating strategies: Developing various approaches and plans to tackle the problem effectively.
• Evaluation and selection: Assessing the viability and potential outcomes of the proposed solutions and selecting the most appropriate one.
• Implementation: Putting the chosen solution into action and executing the necessary steps to resolve the problem.
• Monitoring and feedback: Continuously evaluating the implemented solution and obtaining feedback to ensure its effectiveness.
• Adaptation and improvement: Modifying and refining the solution as needed to optimize results and prevent similar problems from arising in the future.

Skills and Qualities for Effective Problem Solving:

• Analytical thinking: The ability to break down complex problems into smaller, manageable components and analyze them thoroughly.
• Creativity: Thinking outside the box and generating innovative solutions.
• Decision making: Making logical and informed choices based on available data and critical thinking.
• Communication: Clearly conveying ideas, listening actively, and collaborating with others to solve problems as a team.
• Resilience: Maintaining a positive mindset, perseverance, and adaptability in the face of challenges.
• Resourcefulness: Utilizing available resources and seeking new approaches when confronted with obstacles.
• Time management: Effectively organizing and prioritizing tasks to optimize problem-solving efficiency.

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Problem-Solving Strategies and Obstacles

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• Application
• Improvement

From deciding what to eat for dinner to considering whether it's the right time to buy a house, problem-solving is a large part of our daily lives. Learn some of the problem-solving strategies that exist and how to use them in real life, along with ways to overcome obstacles that are making it harder to resolve the issues you face.

What Is Problem-Solving?

In cognitive psychology , the term 'problem-solving' refers to the mental process that people go through to discover, analyze, and solve problems.

A problem exists when there is a goal that we want to achieve but the process by which we will achieve it is not obvious to us. Put another way, there is something that we want to occur in our life, yet we are not immediately certain how to make it happen.

Maybe you want a better relationship with your spouse or another family member but you're not sure how to improve it. Or you want to start a business but are unsure what steps to take. Problem-solving helps you figure out how to achieve these desires.

The problem-solving process involves:

• Discovery of the problem
• Deciding to tackle the issue
• Seeking to understand the problem more fully
• Researching available options or solutions
• Taking action to resolve the issue

Before problem-solving can occur, it is important to first understand the exact nature of the problem itself. If your understanding of the issue is faulty, your attempts to resolve it will also be incorrect or flawed.

Problem-Solving Mental Processes

Several mental processes are at work during problem-solving. Among them are:

• Perceptually recognizing the problem
• Representing the problem in memory
• Considering relevant information that applies to the problem
• Identifying different aspects of the problem
• Labeling and describing the problem

Problem-Solving Strategies

There are many ways to go about solving a problem. Some of these strategies might be used on their own, or you may decide to employ multiple approaches when working to figure out and fix a problem.

An algorithm is a step-by-step procedure that, by following certain "rules" produces a solution. Algorithms are commonly used in mathematics to solve division or multiplication problems. But they can be used in other fields as well.

In psychology, algorithms can be used to help identify individuals with a greater risk of mental health issues. For instance, research suggests that certain algorithms might help us recognize children with an elevated risk of suicide or self-harm.

One benefit of algorithms is that they guarantee an accurate answer. However, they aren't always the best approach to problem-solving, in part because detecting patterns can be incredibly time-consuming.

There are also concerns when machine learning is involved—also known as artificial intelligence (AI)—such as whether they can accurately predict human behaviors.

Heuristics are shortcut strategies that people can use to solve a problem at hand. These "rule of thumb" approaches allow you to simplify complex problems, reducing the total number of possible solutions to a more manageable set.

If you find yourself sitting in a traffic jam, for example, you may quickly consider other routes, taking one to get moving once again. When shopping for a new car, you might think back to a prior experience when negotiating got you a lower price, then employ the same tactics.

While heuristics may be helpful when facing smaller issues, major decisions shouldn't necessarily be made using a shortcut approach. Heuristics also don't guarantee an effective solution, such as when trying to drive around a traffic jam only to find yourself on an equally crowded route.

Trial and Error

A trial-and-error approach to problem-solving involves trying a number of potential solutions to a particular issue, then ruling out those that do not work. If you're not sure whether to buy a shirt in blue or green, for instance, you may try on each before deciding which one to purchase.

This can be a good strategy to use if you have a limited number of solutions available. But if there are many different choices available, narrowing down the possible options using another problem-solving technique can be helpful before attempting trial and error.

In some cases, the solution to a problem can appear as a sudden insight. You are facing an issue in a relationship or your career when, out of nowhere, the solution appears in your mind and you know exactly what to do.

Insight can occur when the problem in front of you is similar to an issue that you've dealt with in the past. Although, you may not recognize what is occurring since the underlying mental processes that lead to insight often happen outside of conscious awareness .

Research indicates that insight is most likely to occur during times when you are alone—such as when going on a walk by yourself, when you're in the shower, or when lying in bed after waking up.

How to Apply Problem-Solving Strategies in Real Life

If you're facing a problem, you can implement one or more of these strategies to find a potential solution. Here's how to use them in real life:

• Create a flow chart . If you have time, you can take advantage of the algorithm approach to problem-solving by sitting down and making a flow chart of each potential solution, its consequences, and what happens next.
• Recall your past experiences . When a problem needs to be solved fairly quickly, heuristics may be a better approach. Think back to when you faced a similar issue, then use your knowledge and experience to choose the best option possible.
• Start trying potential solutions . If your options are limited, start trying them one by one to see which solution is best for achieving your desired goal. If a particular solution doesn't work, move on to the next.
• Take some time alone . Since insight is often achieved when you're alone, carve out time to be by yourself for a while. The answer to your problem may come to you, seemingly out of the blue, if you spend some time away from others.

Obstacles to Problem-Solving

Problem-solving is not a flawless process as there are a number of obstacles that can interfere with our ability to solve a problem quickly and efficiently. These obstacles include:

• Assumptions: When dealing with a problem, people can make assumptions about the constraints and obstacles that prevent certain solutions. Thus, they may not even try some potential options.
• Functional fixedness : This term refers to the tendency to view problems only in their customary manner. Functional fixedness prevents people from fully seeing all of the different options that might be available to find a solution.
• Irrelevant or misleading information: When trying to solve a problem, it's important to distinguish between information that is relevant to the issue and irrelevant data that can lead to faulty solutions. The more complex the problem, the easier it is to focus on misleading or irrelevant information.
• Mental set: A mental set is a tendency to only use solutions that have worked in the past rather than looking for alternative ideas. A mental set can work as a heuristic, making it a useful problem-solving tool. However, mental sets can also lead to inflexibility, making it more difficult to find effective solutions.

How to Improve Your Problem-Solving Skills

In the end, if your goal is to become a better problem-solver, it's helpful to remember that this is a process. Thus, if you want to improve your problem-solving skills, following these steps can help lead you to your solution:

• Recognize that a problem exists . If you are facing a problem, there are generally signs. For instance, if you have a mental illness , you may experience excessive fear or sadness, mood changes, and changes in sleeping or eating habits. Recognizing these signs can help you realize that an issue exists.
• Decide to solve the problem . Make a conscious decision to solve the issue at hand. Commit to yourself that you will go through the steps necessary to find a solution.
• Seek to fully understand the issue . Analyze the problem you face, looking at it from all sides. If your problem is relationship-related, for instance, ask yourself how the other person may be interpreting the issue. You might also consider how your actions might be contributing to the situation.
• Research potential options . Using the problem-solving strategies mentioned, research potential solutions. Make a list of options, then consider each one individually. What are some pros and cons of taking the available routes? What would you need to do to make them happen?
• Take action . Select the best solution possible and take action. Action is one of the steps required for change . So, go through the motions needed to resolve the issue.
• Try another option, if needed . If the solution you chose didn't work, don't give up. Either go through the problem-solving process again or simply try another option.

You can find a way to solve your problems as long as you keep working toward this goal—even if the best solution is simply to let go because no other good solution exists.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

7.3 Problem Solving

Learning objectives.

• Describe problem solving strategies
• Define algorithm and heuristic
• Explain some common roadblocks to effective problem solving

People face problems every day—usually, multiple problems throughout the day. Sometimes these problems are straightforward: To double a recipe for pizza dough, for example, all that is required is that each ingredient in the recipe be doubled. Sometimes, however, the problems we encounter are more complex. For example, say you have a work deadline, and you must mail a printed copy of a report to your supervisor by the end of the business day. The report is time-sensitive and must be sent overnight. You finished the report last night, but your printer will not work today. What should you do? First, you need to identify the problem and then apply a strategy for solving the problem.

Problem-Solving Strategies

When you are presented with a problem—whether it is a complex mathematical problem or a broken printer, how do you solve it? Before finding a solution to the problem, the problem must first be clearly identified. After that, one of many problem solving strategies can be applied, hopefully resulting in a solution.

A problem-solving strategy is a plan of action used to find a solution. Different strategies have different action plans associated with them ( Table 7.2 ). For example, a well-known strategy is trial and error . The old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” describes trial and error. In terms of your broken printer, you could try checking the ink levels, and if that doesn’t work, you could check to make sure the paper tray isn’t jammed. Or maybe the printer isn’t actually connected to your laptop. When using trial and error, you would continue to try different solutions until you solved your problem. Although trial and error is not typically one of the most time-efficient strategies, it is a commonly used one.

Another type of strategy is an algorithm. An algorithm is a problem-solving formula that provides you with step-by-step instructions used to achieve a desired outcome (Kahneman, 2011). You can think of an algorithm as a recipe with highly detailed instructions that produce the same result every time they are performed. Algorithms are used frequently in our everyday lives, especially in computer science. When you run a search on the Internet, search engines like Google use algorithms to decide which entries will appear first in your list of results. Facebook also uses algorithms to decide which posts to display on your newsfeed. Can you identify other situations in which algorithms are used?

A heuristic is another type of problem solving strategy. While an algorithm must be followed exactly to produce a correct result, a heuristic is a general problem-solving framework (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). You can think of these as mental shortcuts that are used to solve problems. A “rule of thumb” is an example of a heuristic. Such a rule saves the person time and energy when making a decision, but despite its time-saving characteristics, it is not always the best method for making a rational decision. Different types of heuristics are used in different types of situations, but the impulse to use a heuristic occurs when one of five conditions is met (Pratkanis, 1989):

• When one is faced with too much information
• When the time to make a decision is limited
• When the decision to be made is unimportant
• When there is access to very little information to use in making the decision
• When an appropriate heuristic happens to come to mind in the same moment

Working backwards is a useful heuristic in which you begin solving the problem by focusing on the end result. Consider this example: You live in Washington, D.C. and have been invited to a wedding at 4 PM on Saturday in Philadelphia. Knowing that Interstate 95 tends to back up any day of the week, you need to plan your route and time your departure accordingly. If you want to be at the wedding service by 3:30 PM, and it takes 2.5 hours to get to Philadelphia without traffic, what time should you leave your house? You use the working backwards heuristic to plan the events of your day on a regular basis, probably without even thinking about it.

Another useful heuristic is the practice of accomplishing a large goal or task by breaking it into a series of smaller steps. Students often use this common method to complete a large research project or long essay for school. For example, students typically brainstorm, develop a thesis or main topic, research the chosen topic, organize their information into an outline, write a rough draft, revise and edit the rough draft, develop a final draft, organize the references list, and proofread their work before turning in the project. The large task becomes less overwhelming when it is broken down into a series of small steps.

Everyday Connection

Solving puzzles.

Problem-solving abilities can improve with practice. Many people challenge themselves every day with puzzles and other mental exercises to sharpen their problem-solving skills. Sudoku puzzles appear daily in most newspapers. Typically, a sudoku puzzle is a 9×9 grid. The simple sudoku below ( Figure 7.8 ) is a 4×4 grid. To solve the puzzle, fill in the empty boxes with a single digit: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Here are the rules: The numbers must total 10 in each bolded box, each row, and each column; however, each digit can only appear once in a bolded box, row, and column. Time yourself as you solve this puzzle and compare your time with a classmate.

Here is another popular type of puzzle ( Figure 7.9 ) that challenges your spatial reasoning skills. Connect all nine dots with four connecting straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper:

Take a look at the “Puzzling Scales” logic puzzle below ( Figure 7.10 ). Sam Loyd, a well-known puzzle master, created and refined countless puzzles throughout his lifetime (Cyclopedia of Puzzles, n.d.).

Pitfalls to Problem Solving

Not all problems are successfully solved, however. What challenges stop us from successfully solving a problem? Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Imagine a person in a room that has four doorways. One doorway that has always been open in the past is now locked. The person, accustomed to exiting the room by that particular doorway, keeps trying to get out through the same doorway even though the other three doorways are open. The person is stuck—but she just needs to go to another doorway, instead of trying to get out through the locked doorway. A mental set is where you persist in approaching a problem in a way that has worked in the past but is clearly not working now.

Functional fixedness is a type of mental set where you cannot perceive an object being used for something other than what it was designed for. During the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, NASA engineers at Mission Control had to overcome functional fixedness to save the lives of the astronauts aboard the spacecraft. An explosion in a module of the spacecraft damaged multiple systems. The astronauts were in danger of being poisoned by rising levels of carbon dioxide because of problems with the carbon dioxide filters. The engineers found a way for the astronauts to use spare plastic bags, tape, and air hoses to create a makeshift air filter, which saved the lives of the astronauts.

Link to Learning

Check out this Apollo 13 scene where the group of NASA engineers are given the task of overcoming functional fixedness.

Researchers have investigated whether functional fixedness is affected by culture. In one experiment, individuals from the Shuar group in Ecuador were asked to use an object for a purpose other than that for which the object was originally intended. For example, the participants were told a story about a bear and a rabbit that were separated by a river and asked to select among various objects, including a spoon, a cup, erasers, and so on, to help the animals. The spoon was the only object long enough to span the imaginary river, but if the spoon was presented in a way that reflected its normal usage, it took participants longer to choose the spoon to solve the problem. (German & Barrett, 2005). The researchers wanted to know if exposure to highly specialized tools, as occurs with individuals in industrialized nations, affects their ability to transcend functional fixedness. It was determined that functional fixedness is experienced in both industrialized and nonindustrialized cultures (German & Barrett, 2005).

In order to make good decisions, we use our knowledge and our reasoning. Often, this knowledge and reasoning is sound and solid. Sometimes, however, we are swayed by biases or by others manipulating a situation. For example, let’s say you and three friends wanted to rent a house and had a combined target budget of $1,600. The realtor shows you only very run-down houses for $1,600 and then shows you a very nice house for $2,000. Might you ask each person to pay more in rent to get the $2,000 home? Why would the realtor show you the run-down houses and the nice house? The realtor may be challenging your anchoring bias. An anchoring bias occurs when you focus on one piece of information when making a decision or solving a problem. In this case, you’re so focused on the amount of money you are willing to spend that you may not recognize what kinds of houses are available at that price point.

The confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on information that confirms your existing beliefs. For example, if you think that your professor is not very nice, you notice all of the instances of rude behavior exhibited by the professor while ignoring the countless pleasant interactions he is involved in on a daily basis. Hindsight bias leads you to believe that the event you just experienced was predictable, even though it really wasn’t. In other words, you knew all along that things would turn out the way they did. Representative bias describes a faulty way of thinking, in which you unintentionally stereotype someone or something; for example, you may assume that your professors spend their free time reading books and engaging in intellectual conversation, because the idea of them spending their time playing volleyball or visiting an amusement park does not fit in with your stereotypes of professors.

Finally, the availability heuristic is a heuristic in which you make a decision based on an example, information, or recent experience that is that readily available to you, even though it may not be the best example to inform your decision . Biases tend to “preserve that which is already established—to maintain our preexisting knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and hypotheses” (Aronson, 1995; Kahneman, 2011). These biases are summarized in Table 7.3 .

Please visit this site to see a clever music video that a high school teacher made to explain these and other cognitive biases to his AP psychology students.

Were you able to determine how many marbles are needed to balance the scales in Figure 7.10 ? You need nine. Were you able to solve the problems in Figure 7.8 and Figure 7.9 ? Here are the answers ( Figure 7.11 ).

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Insight Learning (Definition+ 4 Stages + Examples)

Have you ever been so focused on a problem that it took stepping away for you to figure it out? You can’t find the solution when you’re looking at all of the moving parts, but once you get distracted with something else - “A-ha!” you have it. 

When a problem cannot be solved by applying an obvious step-by-step solving sequence,   Insight learning occurs when the mind rearranges the elements of the problem and finds connections that were not obvious in the initial presentation of the problem. People experience this as a sudden A-ha moment.

Humans aren’t the only species that have these “A-ha” moments. Work with other species helped psychologists understand the definition and stages of Insight Learning. This video is going to break down those stages and how you can help to move these “a-ha” moments along. 

What Is Insight Learning? 

Insight learning is a process that leads to a sudden realization regarding a problem. Often, the learner has tried to understand the problem, but steps away before the change in perception occurs. Insight learning is often compared to trial-and-error learning, but it’s slightly different.

Rather than just trying different random solutions, insight learning requires more comprehension. Learners aim to understand the relationships between the pieces of the puzzle. They use patterns, organization, and past knowledge to solve the problem at hand. 

Is Insight Learning Only Observed In Humans? 

Humans aren’t the only species that learn with insight. Not all species use this process - just the ones that are closest to us intellectually. Insight learning was first discovered not by observing humans, but by observing chimps. 

In the early 1900s, Wolfgang Köhler observed chimpanzees as they solved problems. Köhler’s most famous subject was a chimp named Sultan. The psychologist gave Sultan two sticks of different sizes and placed a banana outside of Sultan’s cage. He watched as Sultan looked at the sticks and tried to reach for the banana with no success. Eventually, Sultan gave up and got distracted. But it was during this time that Köhler noticed Sultan having an “epiphany.” The chimp went back to the sticks, placed one inside of the other, and used this to bring the banana to him. 

Since Köhler’s original observations took place, psychologists looked deeper into the insight process and when you are more likely to experience that “a-ha” moment. There isn’t an exact science to insight learning, but certain theories suggest that some places are better for epiphanies than others. 

Four Stages of Insight Learning 

But how does insight learning happen? Multiple models have been developed, but the four-stage model is the most popular. The four stages of insight learning are preparation, incubation, insight, and verification. 

Preparation

The process begins as you try to solve the problem. You have the materials and information in front of you and begin to make connections. Although you see the relationships between the materials, things just haven’t “clicked” yet. This is the stage where you start to get frustrated. 

During the incubation period, you “give up” for a short period of time. Although you’ve abandoned the project, your brain is still making connections on an unconscious level. 

When the right connections have been made in your mind, the “a-ha” moment occurs. Eureka! You have an epiphany! 

Verification

Now, you just have to make sure that your epiphany is right. You test out your solution and hopefully, it works! This is a great moment in your learning journey. The connections you make solving this problem are likely to help you in the future. 

Examples of Insight Learning

Insight learning refers to the sudden realization or understanding of a solution to a problem without the need for trial-and-error attempts. It's like a "light bulb" moment when things suddenly make sense. Here are some examples of insight learning:

• The Matchstick Problem : Realizing you can light a match and use it to illuminate a dark room instead of fumbling around in the dark.
• Sudoku Puzzles : Suddenly seeing a pattern or number placement that you hadn't noticed before, allowing you to complete the puzzle.
• The Two Rope Problem : In an experiment, a person is given two ropes hanging from the ceiling and is asked to tie them together. The solution involves swinging one rope like a pendulum and grabbing it with the other.
• Opening Jars : After struggling to open a jar, you remember you can tap its lid lightly or use a rubber grip to make it easier.
• Tangram Puzzles : Suddenly realizing how to arrange the geometric pieces to complete the picture without any gaps.
• Escape Rooms : Having an "aha" moment about a clue that helps you solve a puzzle and move to the next challenge.
• The Nine Dot Problem : Connecting all nine dots using only four straight lines without lifting the pen.
• Cooking : Realizing you can soften butter quickly by grating it or placing it between two sheets of parchment paper and rolling it.
• Math Problems : Suddenly understanding a complex math concept or solution method after pondering it for a while.
• Guitar Tuning : Realizing you can use the fifth fret of one string to tune the next string.
• Traffic Routes : Discovering a faster or more efficient route to your destination without using a GPS.
• Packing Suitcases : Figuring out how to fit everything by rolling clothes or rearranging items in a specific order.
• The Crow and the Pitcher : A famous Aesop's fable where a thirsty crow drops pebbles into a pitcher to raise the water level and drink.
• Computer Shortcuts : Discovering a keyboard shortcut that makes a task you frequently do much quicker.
• Gardening : Realizing you can use eggshells or coffee grounds as a natural fertilizer.
• Physics Problems : After struggling with a concept, suddenly understanding the relationship between two variables in an equation.
• Art : Discovering a new technique or perspective that transforms your artwork.
• Sports : Realizing a different way to grip a tennis racket or baseball bat that improves your game.
• Language Learning : Suddenly understanding the grammar or pronunciation rule that was previously confusing.
• DIY Projects : Figuring out a way to repurpose old items in your home, like using an old ladder as a bookshelf.

Where Is the Best Place to Have an Epiphany? 

But what if you want to have an epiphany? You’re stuck on a problem and you can’t take it anymore. You want to abandon it, but you’re not sure what you should do for this epiphany to take place. Although an “a-ha” moment isn’t guaranteed, studies suggest that the following activities or places can help you solve a tough problem. 

The Three B’s of Creativity 

Creativity and divergent thinking are key to solving problems. And some places encourage creativity more than others. Researchers believe that you can kickstart divergent thinking with the three B’s: bed, bath, and the bus. 

Sleep 

“Bed” might be your best bet out of the three. Studies show that if you get a full night’s sleep, you will be twice as likely to solve a problem than if you stay up all night. This could be due to the REM sleep that you get throughout the night. During REM sleep , your brain is hard at work processing the day’s information and securing connections. Who knows - maybe you’ll dream up the answer to your problems tonight!

Meditation 

The word for “insight” in the Pali language is vipassana. If you have ever been interested in meditation , you might have seen this word before. You can do a vipassana meditation at home, or you can go to a 10-day retreat. These retreats are often silent and are set up to cultivate mind-body awareness. 

You certainly don’t have to sign up for a 10-day silent retreat to solve a problem that is bugging you. (Although, you may have a series of breakthroughs!) Try meditating for 20 minutes at a time. Studies show that this can increase the likelihood of solving a problem. 

Laugh! 

How do you feel when you have an epiphany? Good, right? The next time you’re trying to solve a problem, check in with your emotions. You are more likely to experience insight when you’re in a positive mood. Positivity opens your mind and gives your mind more freedom to explore. That exploration may just lead you to your solution. 

Be patient when you’re trying to solve problems. Take breaks when you need to and make sure that you are taking care of yourself. This approach will help you solve problems faster and more efficiently!

Insight Vs. Other Types Of Learning.

Learning by insight is  not  learning by trial and  error, nor by observation  and imitation. Learning by insight is a learning theory accepted by the Gestalt  school of psychology, which disagrees with the behaviorist  school, which claims that all learning occurs through conditioning from the  external environment.

Gestalt is a German word that approximately translates as ‘an organized whole  that has properties  and elements in addition to the sum of its parts .’ By viewing a problem as a ‘gestalt’ , the learner does not simply react to whatever she observes at the moment. She also imagines elements that could be present but are not and uses her imagination to combine parts of the problem that are presently not so combined in fact.  

Insight Vs. Trial And Error Learning

Imagine yourself in a maze-running competition. You and your rivals each have 10 goes. The first one to run the maze successfully wins $500. You may adopt a trial-and-error strategy, making random turning decisions and remembering whether those particular turns were successful or not for your next try. If you have a good memory and with a bit of luck, you will get to the exit and win the prize.

Completing the maze through trial and error requires no insight. If you had to run a different maze, you would have no advantage over running previous mazes with different designs. You have now learned to run this particular maze as predicted by behaviorist psychologists. External factors condition your maze running behavior. The cash prize motivates  you to run the maze in the first place. All maze dead ends act as punishments , which you remember not to repeat. All correct turns act as rewards , which you remember to repeat.

If you viewed the maze running competition as a gestalt, you might notice that it doesn't explicitly state in the competition rules that you must run along the designated paths to reach the exit.

Suppose you further noticed that the maze walls were made from cardboard. In that case, you may combine those 2 observations in your imagination and realize that you could just punch big holes in the walls or tear them down completely, to see around corners and directly run to the now visible exit.

Insight Vs. Learning Through Observation, Imitation, And Repetition

Observation, imitation, and repetition are at the heart of training. The violin teacher shows you how to hold your bow correctly; you practice your scales countless times before learning to play a sonata from Beethoven flawlessly. Mastering a sport or a musical instrument rarely comes from a flash of insight but a lot of repetition and error correction from your teacher.

Herbert Lawford, the Scottish tennis player, and 1887 Wimbledon champion, is credited for being the first player to play a topspin. Who could have taught it to him? Who could he have imitated? One can only speculate since no player at that time was being coached on how to hit topspin.

He could have only learned to play a topspin by having a novel insight. One possibility is that he played one by accident during training, by mistakenly hitting the ball at a flatter angle than normal. He could then have observed that his opponent was disorientated by the flatter and quicker bounce of the ball and realized the benefit of his ‘mistake’ .

Behaviorist theories of learning can probably explain how most successful and good tennis players are produced, but you need a Gestalt insight learning theory to explain Herbert Lawford.

Another interesting famous anecdote illustrating insight learning concerned Carl Friedrich Gauss when he was a 7-year-old pupil at school. His mathematics teacher seems to have adopted strict behaviorism in his teaching since the original story implies that he beat students with a switch.

One day the teacher set classwork requiring the students to add up all the numbers from 1 to 100. He expected his pupils to perform this calculation in how they were trained. He expected it to be a laborious and time-consuming task, giving him a long break. In just a few moments, young Gauss handed in the correct answer after having to make at most 2 calculations, which are easy to do in your head. How did he do it? Gauss saw the arithmetic sequence as a gestalt instead of adding all the numbers one at a time: 1+2+3+4…. +99+100 as he expected.

He realized that by breaking this sequence in half at 50, then snaking the last number (100) under the first number (1), and then adding the 2 halves of the arithmetic sequence like so:  

    1         +        2       +        3      +       4      +       5         +    ………….      +        48        +        49             +       50

100        +       99       +      98      +     97      +      96       +    …………...    +        53        +         52           +       51

101        +      101      +    101     +    101      +     101     +   …………….     +     101        +       101           +     101    

Arranged in this way, each number column adds up to 101, so all Gauss needed to do was calculate 50 x 101 = 5050.

Can Major Scientific Breakthroughs be made through observation and experiment alone?

Science is unapologetically an evidence-based inquiry. Observations, repeatable experiments, and hard, measurable data must support theories and explanations.

Since countless things can be observed and comparisons made, they cannot be done randomly for observations and experiments to advance knowledge. They must be guided by a good question and a  testable hypothesis. Before performing actual experiments and observations, scientists often first perform thought experiments . They think of ideal situations by imagining ways things could be or imaging away things that are.

Atoms were talked about long before electron microscopes could observe them. How could atoms be seriously discussed in ancient Greece long before the discoveries of modern chemistry? Pre-Socratic philosophers were puzzled by a purely philosophical problem, which they termed the problem of the one and many .  

People long observed that the world was made of many different things that didn't remain static but continuously changed into other various things. For example, a seed different from a tree changed into a tree over time. Small infants change into adults yet remain the same person. Boiling water became steam, and frozen water became ice.

Observing all of this in the world, philosophers didn’t simply take it for granted and aimed to profit from it practically through stimulus-response and trial and error learning. They were puzzled by how the world fit together as a whole.

To make sense of all this observable changing multiplicity, one needed to imagine an unobservable sameness behind it all. Yet, there is no obvious or immediate punishment or reward. Therefore, there seems to be no satisfying behaviorist reason behind philosophical speculations.

Thinkers such as Empedocles and Aristotle made associations between general properties in the world wetness, dryness, temperature, and phases of matter as follows:

• Earth :  dry, cold     
• Fire:  dry, hot
• Water:  wet, cold
• Air: hot or wet, depending on whether moisture or heat prevails in the atmosphere.

These 4 primitive elements transformed and combined give rise to the diversity we see in the world. However, this view was still too sensually based  to provide the world with sought-for coherence and unity. How could a multiplicity of truly basic stuff interact? Doesn't such an interaction presuppose something more fundamental in common?

The ratio of these 4 elements was thought to affect the properties of things. Stone contained more earth, while a rabbit had more water and fire, thus making it soft and giving it life. Although this theory correctly predicted that seemingly basic things like stones were complex compounds, it had some serious flaws.

For example, if you break a stone in half many times, the pieces never resemble fire, air, water, or earth.   

To account for how different things could be the same on one level and different on another level, Leucippus and his student Democritus reasoned that all things are the same in that they were made from some common primitive indivisible stuff but different due to the different ways or patterns in which this indivisible stuff or atoms could be arranged.

For atoms to be able to rearrange and recombine into different patterns led thinkers to the insight that if the atom idea was true, then logically, there had to be free spaces between the atoms for them to shift into. They had to imagine a vacuum, another phenomenon not directly observable since every nook and cranny in the world seems to be filled with some liquid, solid, or gas.  

This ancient notion of vacuum proved to be more than just a made-up story since it led to modern practical applications in the form of vacuum cleaners and food vacuum packing.

This insight that atoms and void exist makes no sense from a behaviorist learning standpoint. It cannot be explained in terms of stimulus-response or environmental conditioning and made no practical difference in the lives of ancient Greeks.  

For philosophers to feel compelled to hold onto notions, which at the time weren’t directly useful, it suggests that they must have felt some need to understand the universe as an intelligible ‘gestalt’ One may even argue that the word Cosmos, from the Greek word Kosmos, which roughly translates to ‘harmonious arrangement’ is at least a partial synonym.  

The Historical Development Of The Theory of Insight Learning

Wolfgang Kohler , the German gestalt psychologist, is credited for formulating the theory of insight learning, one of the first cognitive learning theories. He came up with the theory while first conducting experiments  in 1913 on 7 chimpanzees  on the island of Tenerife to observe how they learned to solve problems.

In one experiment, he dangled a banana from the top of a high cage. Boxes and poles were left in the cage with the chimpanzees. At first, the chimps used trial and error to get at the banana. They tried to jump up to the banana without success. After many failed attempts, Kohler noticed that they paused to think  for a while.  

After some time, they behaved more methodically by stacking the boxes on top of each other, making a raised platform from which they could swipe at the banana using the available poles. Kohler believed that chimps, like humans, were capable of experiencing flashes of insight, just like humans.

In another experiment, he placed a peanut down a long narrow tube attached to the cage's outer side. The chimpanzee tried scooping the peanut out with his hand and fingers, but to no avail, since the tube was too long and narrow. After sitting down to think, the chimp filled its mouth with water from a nearby water container in the cage and spat it into the tube.

The peanut floated up the tube within the chimp's reach. What is essential is that the chimp realized it could use water as a tool in a flash of insight, something it had never done before or never shown how  to do .  Kohler's conclusions contrasted with those of American psychologist Edward Thorndike , who, years back, conducted learning experiments on cats, dogs, and monkeys.

Through his experiments and research, Thorndike concluded that although there was a vast difference in learning speed and potential between monkey dogs and cats, he concluded that all animals, unlike humans, are not capable of genuine reasoned thought. According to him, Animals can only learn through stimulus-response conditioning, trial and error, and solve problems accidentally.

Kohler’s 4 Stage Model Of Insight Learning

From his observations of how chimpanzees solve complex problems, he concluded that the learning process went through the following 4 stages:

• Preparation:  Learners encounter the problem and begin to survey all relevant information and materials. They process stimuli and begin to make connections.
• Incubation: Learners get frustrated and may even seem to observers as giving up. However, their brains carry on processing information unconsciously.
• Insight: The learner finally achieves a breakthrough, otherwise called an epiphany or ‘Aha’ moment. This insight comes in a flash and is often a radical reorganization of the problem. It is a discontinuous leap in understanding rather than continuous with reasoning undertaken in the preparation phase.
• Verification: The learner now formally tests the new insight and sees if it works in multiple different situations. Mathematical insights are formally proved.

The 2 nd  and 3 rd  stages of insight learning are well described in anecdotes of famous scientific breakthroughs. In 1861, August Kekulé was contemplating the structure of the Benzene molecule. He knew it was a chain of 6 carbon atoms attached to 6 hydrogen atoms. Still, He got stuck   (incubation phase)  on working out how they could fit together to remain chemically stable.

He turned away from his desk and, facing the fireplace, fell asleep. He dreamt of a snake eating its tail and then spinning around. He woke up and realized (insight phase)  that these carbon-hydrogen chains can close onto themselves to form hexagonal rings. He then worked out the consequences of his new insight on Benzene rings. (Verification phase)

Suitably prepared minds can experience insights while observing ordinary day-to-day events. Many people must have seen apples fall from trees and thought nothing of it. When Newton saw an apple fall, he connected its fall to the action of the moon. If an unseen force pulls the apple from the tree top, couldn't the same force extends to the moon? This same force must be keeping the moon tethered in orbit around the earth, keeping it from whizzing off into space. Of course, this seems counterintuitive because if the moon is like the apple, should it not be crashing down to earth?

Newton's prepared mind understood the moon to be continuously falling to earth around the horizon's curve. Earth's gravitational pull on the moon balanced its horizontal velocity tangential to its orbit. If the apple were shot fast enough over the horizon from a cannon, it too, like the moon, would stay in orbit.

So, although before Newton, everyone was aware of gravity in a stimulus-response kind of way and even made practical use of it to weigh things, no one understood its universal implications.

Applying Insight Learning To The Classroom

The preparation-incubation-insight- verification cycle could be implemented by teachers in the classroom. Gestalt theory predicts that students learn best when they engage with the material; they are mentally prepared  for age, and maturity, having had experiences enabling them to relate to the material and having background knowledge that allows them to contextualize the material. When first presenting content they want to teach the students, teachers must make sure students are suitably prepared to receive the material, to successfully go through the preparation stage of learning.

Teachers should present the material holistically and contextually. For example, when teaching about the human heart, they should also teach where it is in the human body and its functional importance and relationship to other organs and parts of the body. Teachers could also connect other fields, such as comparing hearts to mechanical pumps.

Once the teacher has imparted sufficient background information to students, they should set a problem for their students to solve independently or in groups. The problem should require the students to apply what they have learned in a new way and make novel connections not explicitly made by the teacher during the lesson.

However, they must already know and be familiar with all the material they need to solve the problem. Students must be allowed to fumble their way to a solution  and make many mistakes , as this is vital for the incubation phase. The teacher should resist the temptation to spoon-feed them. Instead, teachers should use the Socratic method to coax the students into arriving at solutions and answers themselves.

Allowing the students to go through a sufficiently challenging incubation phase engages all their higher cognitive functions, such as logical and abstract reasoning, visualization, and imagination. It also habituates them to a bit of frustration to build the mental toughness to stay focused.

It also forces their brains to work hard in processing combining information to sufficiently own the insights they achieve, making it more likely that they will retain  the knowledge they gained and be able to apply it across different contexts.

Once students have written down their insights and solutions, the teacher should guide them through the verification phase. The teacher and students need to check and test the validity of the answers. Solutions should be checked for errors and inconsistencies and checked against the norms and standards of the field.

However, one should remember that mass education is aimed at students of average capacity and that not all students are always equally capable of learning through insight. Also, students need to be prepared to gain the ability and potential to have fruitful insights.  

Learning purely from stimulus-response conditioning is insufficient for progress and major breakthroughs to be made in the sciences. For breakthroughs to be made, humans need to be increasingly capable of higher and higher levels of abstract thinking.

However, we are not all equally capable of having epiphanies on the cutting edge of scientific research. Most education aims to elevate average reasoning, knowledge, and skill acquisition. For insight, learning must build on rather than replace behaviorist teaching practices.

Related posts:

• The Psychology of Long Distance Relationships
• Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI Test)
• Operant Conditioning (Examples + Research)
• Variable Interval Reinforcement Schedule (Examples)
• Concrete Operational Stage (3rd Cognitive Development)

Reference this article:

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Operant Conditioning

Classical Conditioning

Observational Learning

Latent Learning

Experiential Learning

The Little Albert Study

Bobo Doll Experiment

Spacing Effect

Von Restorff Effect

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Insight Learning Theory: Definition, Stages, and Examples

Categories Learning

Insight learning theory is all about those “lightbulb moments” we experience when we suddenly understand something. Instead of slowly figuring things out through trial and error, insight theory says we can suddenly see the solution to a problem in our minds. 

This theory is super important because it helps us understand how our brains work when we learn and solve problems. It can help teachers find better ways to teach and improve our problem-solving skills and creativity. It’s not just useful in school—insight theory also greatly impacts science, technology, and business.

Table of Contents

What Is Insight Learning?

Insight learning is like having a lightbulb moment in your brain. It’s when you suddenly understand something without needing to go through a step-by-step process. Instead of slowly figuring things out by trial and error, insight learning happens in a flash. One moment, you’re stuck, and the next, you have the solution. 

This type of learning is all about those “aha” experiences that feel like magic. The key principles of insight learning involve recognizing patterns, making connections, and restructuring our thoughts. It’s as if our brains suddenly rearrange the pieces of a puzzle, revealing the big picture. So, next time you have a brilliant idea pop into your head out of nowhere, you might just be experiencing insight learning in action!

Three Components of Insight Learning Theory

Insight learning, a concept rooted in psychology, comprises three distinct properties that characterize its unique nature:

1. Sudden Realization

Unlike gradual problem-solving methods, insight learning involves sudden and profound understanding. Individuals may be stuck on a problem for a while, but then, seemingly out of nowhere, the solution becomes clear. This sudden “aha” moment marks the culmination of mental processes that have been working behind the scenes to reorganize information and generate a new perspective .

2. Restructuring of Problem-Solving Strategies

Insight learning often involves a restructuring of mental representations or problem-solving strategies . Instead of simply trying different approaches until stumbling upon the correct one, individuals experience a shift in how they perceive and approach the problem. This restructuring allows for a more efficient and direct path to the solution once insight occurs.

3. Aha Moments

A hallmark of insight learning is the experience of “aha” moments. These moments are characterized by a sudden sense of clarity and understanding, often accompanied by a feeling of satisfaction or excitement. It’s as if a mental lightbulb turns on, illuminating the solution to a previously perplexing problem. 

These moments of insight can be deeply rewarding and serve as powerful motivators for further learning and problem-solving endeavors.

Four Stages of Insight Learning Theory

Insight learning unfolds in a series of distinct stages, each contributing to the journey from problem recognition to the sudden realization of a solution. These stages are as follows:

1. Problem Recognition

The first stage of insight learning involves recognizing and defining the problem at hand. This may entail identifying obstacles, discrepancies, or gaps in understanding that need to be addressed. Problem recognition sets the stage for the subsequent stages of insight learning by framing the problem and guiding the individual’s cognitive processes toward finding a solution.

2. Incubation

After recognizing the problem, individuals often enter a period of incubation where the mind continues to work on the problem unconsciously. During this stage, the brain engages in background processing, making connections, and reorganizing information without the individual’s conscious awareness. 

While it may seem like a period of inactivity on the surface, incubation is a crucial phase where ideas gestate, and creative solutions take shape beneath the surface of conscious thought.

3. Illumination

The illumination stage marks the sudden emergence of insight or understanding. It is characterized by a moment of clarity and realization, where the solution to the problem becomes apparent in a flash of insight. 

This “aha” moment often feels spontaneous and surprising, as if the solution has been waiting just below the surface of conscious awareness to be revealed. Illumination is the culmination of the cognitive processes initiated during problem recognition and incubation, resulting in a breakthrough in understanding.

4. Verification

Following the illumination stage, individuals verify the validity and feasibility of their insights by testing the proposed solution. This may involve applying the solution in practice, checking it against existing knowledge or expertise, or seeking feedback from others. 

Verification serves to confirm the efficacy of the newfound understanding and ensure its practical applicability in solving the problem at hand. It also provides an opportunity to refine and iterate on the solution based on real-world feedback and experience.

Famous Examples of Insight Learning

Examples of insight learning can be observed in various contexts, ranging from everyday problem-solving to scientific discoveries and creative breakthroughs. Some well-known examples of how insight learning theory works include the following:

Archimedes’ Principle

According to legend, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes experienced a moment of insight while taking a bath. He noticed that the water level rose as he immersed his body, leading him to realize that the volume of water displaced was equal to the volume of the submerged object. This insight led to the formulation of Archimedes’ principle, a fundamental concept in fluid mechanics.

Köhler’s Chimpanzee Experiments

In Wolfgang Köhler’s experiments with chimpanzees on Tenerife in the 1920s, the primates demonstrated insight learning in solving novel problems. One famous example involved a chimpanzee named Sultan, who used sticks to reach bananas placed outside his cage. After unsuccessful attempts at using a single stick, Sultan suddenly combined two sticks to create a longer tool, demonstrating insight into the problem and the ability to use tools creatively.

Eureka Moments in Science

Many scientific discoveries are the result of insight learning. For instance, the famed naturalist Charles Darwin had many eureka moments where he gained sudden insights that led to the formation of his influential theories.

Everyday Examples of Insight Learning Theory

You can probably think of some good examples of the role that insight learning theory plays in your everyday life. A few common real-life examples include:

• Finding a lost item : You might spend a lot of time searching for a lost item, like your keys or phone, but suddenly remember exactly where you left them when you’re doing something completely unrelated. This sudden recollection is an example of insight learning.
• Untangling knots : When trying to untangle a particularly tricky knot, you might struggle with it for a while without making progress. Then, suddenly, you realize a new approach or see a pattern that helps you quickly unravel the knot.
• Cooking improvisation : If you’re cooking and run out of a particular ingredient, you might suddenly come up with a creative substitution or alteration to the recipe that works surprisingly well. This moment of improvisation demonstrates insight learning in action.
• Solving riddles or brain teasers : You might initially be stumped when trying to solve a riddle or a brain teaser. However, after some time pondering the problem, you suddenly grasp the solution in a moment of insight.
• Learning a new skill : Learning to ride a bike or play a musical instrument often involves moments of insight. You might struggle with a certain technique or concept but then suddenly “get it” and experience a significant improvement in your performance.
• Navigating a maze : While navigating through a maze, you might encounter dead ends and wrong turns. However, after some exploration, you suddenly realize the correct path to take and reach the exit efficiently.
• Remembering information : When studying for a test, you might find yourself unable to recall a particular piece of information. Then, when you least expect it, the answer suddenly comes to you in a moment of insight.

These everyday examples illustrate how insight learning is a common and natural part of problem-solving and learning in our daily lives.

Exploring the Uses of Insight Learning

Insight learning isn’t an interesting explanation for how we suddenly come up with a solution to a problem—it also has many practical applications. Here are just a few ways that people can use insight learning in real life:

Problem-Solving

Insight learning helps us solve all sorts of problems, from finding lost items to untangling knots. When we’re stuck, our brains might suddenly come up with a genius idea or a new approach that saves the day. It’s like having a mental superhero swoop in to rescue us when we least expect it!

Ever had a brilliant idea pop into your head out of nowhere? That’s insight learning at work! Whether you’re writing a story, composing music, or designing something new, insight can spark creativity and help you come up with fresh, innovative ideas.

Learning New Skills

Learning isn’t always about memorizing facts or following step-by-step instructions. Sometimes, it’s about having those “aha” moments that make everything click into place. Insight learning can help us grasp tricky concepts, master difficult skills, and become better learners overall.

Insight learning isn’t just for individuals—it’s also crucial for innovation and progress in society. Scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs rely on insight to make groundbreaking discoveries and develop new technologies that improve our lives. Who knows? The next big invention could start with someone having a brilliant idea in the shower!

Overcoming Challenges

Life is full of challenges, but insight learning can help us tackle them with confidence. Whether it’s navigating a maze, solving a puzzle, or facing a tough decision, insight can provide the clarity and creativity we need to overcome obstacles and achieve our goals.

The next time you’re feeling stuck or uninspired, remember: the solution might be just one “aha” moment away!

Alternatives to Insight Learning Theory

While insight learning theory emphasizes sudden understanding and restructuring of problem-solving strategies, several alternative theories offer different perspectives on how learning and problem-solving occur. Here are some of the key alternative theories:

Behaviorism

Behaviorism is a theory that focuses on observable, overt behaviors and the external factors that influence them. According to behaviorists like B.F. Skinner, learning is a result of conditioning, where behaviors are reinforced or punished based on their consequences. 

In contrast to insight learning theory, behaviorism suggests that learning occurs gradually through repeated associations between stimuli and responses rather than sudden insights or realizations.

Cognitive Learning Theory

Cognitive learning theory, influenced by psychologists such as Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky , emphasizes the role of mental processes in learning. This theory suggests that individuals actively construct knowledge and understanding through processes like perception, memory, and problem-solving. 

Cognitive learning theory acknowledges the importance of insight and problem-solving strategies but places greater emphasis on cognitive structures and processes underlying learning.

Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt psychology, which influenced insight learning theory, proposes that learning and problem-solving involve the organization of perceptions into meaningful wholes or “gestalts.” 

Gestalt psychologists like Max Wertheimer emphasized the role of insight and restructuring in problem-solving, but their theories also consider other factors, such as perceptual organization, pattern recognition, and the influence of context.

Information Processing Theory

Information processing theory views the mind as a computer-like system that processes information through various stages, including input, processing, storage, and output. This theory emphasizes the role of attention, memory, and problem-solving strategies in learning and problem-solving. 

While insight learning theory focuses on sudden insights and restructuring, information processing theory considers how individuals encode, manipulate, and retrieve information to solve problems.

Related reading:

• What Is Kolb’s Learning Cycle?
• What Is Latent Learning?
• What Is Scaffolding in Psychology?
• What Is Observational Learning?

Kizilirmak, J. M., Fischer, L., Krause, J., Soch, J., Richter, A., & Schott, B. H. (2021). Learning by insight-like sudden comprehension as a potential strategy to improve memory encoding in older adults .  Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience ,  13 , 661346. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2021.661346

Lind, J., Enquist, M. (2012). Insight learning and shaping . In: Seel, N.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning . Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_851

Osuna-Mascaró, A. J., & Auersperg, A. M. I. (2021). Current understanding of the “insight” phenomenon across disciplines . Frontiers in Psychology , 12, 791398. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.791398

Salmon-Mordekovich, N., & Leikin, M. (2023). Insight problem solving is not that special, but business is not quite ‘as usual’: typical versus exceptional problem-solving strategies .  Psychological Research ,  87 (6), 1995–2009. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-022-01786-5

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Psychology Spot

All About Psychology

The 5 phases of problem solving

Problem solving is a complex psychological process through which we try to find the best way to overcome an obstacle or face a challenge. Unfortunately, this process is not always linear, but can follow tortuous paths, plunging us into a situation of psychological anguish when we believe that there is no possible solution.

On the other hand, knowing the phases of problem solving will save us a lot of headaches. Providing a coherent structure to the situation that concerns us, and having a common thread that guides us along the way, will help us to put some order in the mental chaos that problems usually generate.

To Solve a Problem, Experience Does not Always Work in Our Favor

Experience can be a plus or, on the contrary, become an impediment to solving problems. Psychologists from the universities of Hong Kong and Princeton examined how we implement problem-solving strategies by asking a group of people to solve a series of problems with matches.

Participants were presented with a series of linked squares. Each square in the matrix was made up of separate pieces, and people had to remove a certain number of matches while keeping a specified number of squares intact. The interesting thing about these types of problems is that they generally have more than one solution, different strategies can be used and these must change according to the configuration of the matrix, just as it usually happens with life problems.

These researchers found that participants went through two major stages in problem solving. At first they let themselves be carried away by the perceptual characteristics of the problem and began to explore different strategies, some successful and others not.

In a second moment they used the accumulated experience to narrow their options of strategies, focusing on those that were more successful. The problem is that the more the participants trusted their strategic knowledge, the more difficulties they had in solving problems that demanded the application of novel strategies. In practice, they suffered from a kind of functional fixation.

These series of experiments show us that to solve a problem we must keep an open mind because along the way circumstances are likely to change and we need the mental flexibility necessary to change our problem-solving strategies.

The Stages of Problem Solving We Can All Apply

1. Identify the problem

It may seem like a truism, but the truth is that identifying the real problem is not as easy as it seems, especially when it comes to a situation that affects us emotionally. In fact, when the problem is too scary or we sense that we do not have the psychological tools to solve it, we usually put into practice defense mechanisms such as displacement that allow us to erase the problematic situation from our conscious mind.

Instead, being able to identify the problem is the first step in finding a solution. Many times that means stopping looking outside for the culprits and searching within, wondering why a situation is particularly bothering or hindering us.

2. Understand the problem

Many times the problem brings with it the seed of the solution. So one of the steps in solving a problem is making sure we understand it. It is not enough to identify the problem, we need to define it. For this we need to analyze it from different perspectives.

For example, if we are trying to carry out a professional project that does not finish taking off, we have to clarify the reasons. Do we need more training? Are we in an overly competitive sector? Do we have enough resources? We need to understand the source of the problem.

Organizing the information available is another crucial step in the problem-solving process. We have to ask ourselves both, what we know about the problem and everything we do not know. Ultimately, the accuracy of the solution will largely depend on the amount of information available.

3. Assume a psychological distance

Most of the major problems in life have the potential to generate an emotional tsunami. However, many times that affective involvement obfuscates and prevents us from thinking clearly. That is why on many occasions one of the most important but least known phases for solving problems consists of moving away from what concerns us. To assume a psychological distance , we can take a few days away from the problematic environment or try to stop thinking about what worries us for a while.

During that time the unconscious mind will continue to work and is likely to generate creative and perfectly valid insights that lead to the solution of the problem. That distance to allow us to overcome the functional fixations that prevent us from thinking outside the box, giving way to a mental restructuring that will allow us to see the problem from another perspective.

4. Find solutions and develop strategies

Each problem is different, so it will require a specific solution. A solution cannot always be reached by insight, so it will be necessary to think of possible alternatives to solve the problem. Synectics , for example, is a problem-solving method that uses creativity to find original solutions.

The next step is to develop a strategy, since solutions that do not materialize in concrete steps are very difficult to implement. Therefore, we must ask ourselves how we are going to implement our solution. In this phase of problem solving it is important to be honest with ourselves and “land” that strategy taking into account our resources and real availability. It is useless to develop a great strategy if we cannot apply it later.

5. Evaluation of progress

Very few problems are solved overnight. These are generally complex situations that we must patiently “unwind” over time. Therefore, another of the phases to solve a problem consists of monitoring the results that we are achieving. This way we make sure that we are on the right track and we are not wasting energy and time uselessly.

In this last stage of problem solving it is important to be able to adapt our expectations. It is difficult for a professional project to take off in the blink of an eye, so we must focus on the small steps that indicate that the solution is paying off. To do this, it is important to sit down and reflect on the impact of the solution from time to time.

We must also bear in mind that circumstances often change, so we may need to make adjustments to our initial solution. This requires great mental flexibility to change course when we realize that the strategy is not as effective as we would like.

Fedor, A. et. Al. (2015) Problem solving stages in the five square problem.  Front. Psychol ; 6: 1050.

Louis Lee, N. Y. & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2013) Strategic changes in problem solving.  Journal of Cognitive Psychology ; 25: 165–173. 

Gillen, G. (2009) Managing Executive Function Impairments to Optimize Function.  Cognitive and Perceptual Rehabilitation ; 245-283.

Jennifer Delgado

I am a psychologist and I spent several years writing articles for scientific journals specialized in Health and Psychology. I want to help you create great experiences. Learn more about me .

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Psychology Discussion

Creative thinking: 4 stages of creativity thinking.

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Some of the stages of creativity thinking are:   1. Preparation 2. Incubation 3. Illumination 4. Verification!

This is also a controlled thinking in which the creative thinker whether artist, writer or a scientist is trying to create something new. It involves characteristics of both reasoning and imagination. Creative thinking is a process in which the individual generates an original, unusual and productive solution to a problem.

It is defined as personal, imaginative thinking which produces a new, novel and useful solution. Unlike ordinary solution to problems, creative solutions are the new one to the effect that other people have not thought before.

The product of creative thinking may be a new and unique way of conceptualizing the world around us. The emphasis in creative thinking is on the word ‘new’. In human beings we find two kinds of productive abilities – the convergent and divergent abilities.

Convergent abilities are used to bring together otherwise divergent things. Divergent production abilities are those which are not guided by rules or conventions, but capable of generating new solutions to a problem. Divergent production abilities are particularly important in creative thinking.

Creative thinking involves four stages:

1. Preparation:

In this stage the thinker formulates the problem and collects the facts and materials considered necessary for finding new solutions. Many times the problem cannot be solved even after days, weeks or months of concentrated efforts. Failing to solve the problem, the thinker turns away from it initiating next stage.

2. Incubation:

During this period some of the ideas that were interfering with the solution will tend to fade. The overt activity and sometimes even thinking about the problem is absent in this stage. But the unconscious thought process involved in creative thinking is at work during this period.

Apparently the thinker will be busy in other activities like reading literature or playing games, etc. Inspite of these activities the contemplation about finding a solution to problem will be going on in the mind.

3. Illumination:

Following the period of incubation the creative ideas occur suddenly. Consequently the obscure thing becomes clear. This sudden flash of solution is known as illumination and is similar to ‘aha (eureka)’ experience. For example, Archimedes found solution to the crown problem.

4. Verification:

Though the solution is found in illumination stage, it is necessary to verify whether that solution is correct or not. Hence in this last stage evaluation of the solution is done. If the solution is not satisfactory the thinker will go back to creative process from the beginning.

If it is satisfactory, the same will be accepted and if necessary, minor modification may also be made in solution.

Related Articles:

• Process of Creative Thinking: 4 Stages | Thinking | Processes | Psychology
• Convergent and Divergent Thinking: Difference | Thinking | Psychology
• Imagination and Creative Art | Psychology
• Essay on Creativity: Meaning, Nature and Stimulation

Best , Thinking

7. Thinking and Intelligence

Problem solving, learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe problem solving strategies
• Define algorithm and heuristic
• Explain some common roadblocks to effective problem solving

People face problems every day—usually, multiple problems throughout the day. Sometimes these problems are straightforward: To double a recipe for pizza dough, for example, all that is required is that each ingredient in the recipe be doubled. Sometimes, however, the problems we encounter are more complex. For example, say you have a work deadline, and you must mail a printed copy of a report to your supervisor by the end of the business day. The report is time-sensitive and must be sent overnight. You finished the report last night, but your printer will not work today. What should you do? First, you need to identify the problem and then apply a strategy for solving the problem.

PROBLEM-SOLVING STRATEGIES

When you are presented with a problem—whether it is a complex mathematical problem or a broken printer, how do you solve it? Before finding a solution to the problem, the problem must first be clearly identified. After that, one of many problem solving strategies can be applied, hopefully resulting in a solution.

A problem-solving strategy is a plan of action used to find a solution. Different strategies have different action plans associated with them ( [link] ). For example, a well-known strategy is trial and error . The old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” describes trial and error. In terms of your broken printer, you could try checking the ink levels, and if that doesn’t work, you could check to make sure the paper tray isn’t jammed. Or maybe the printer isn’t actually connected to your laptop. When using trial and error, you would continue to try different solutions until you solved your problem. Although trial and error is not typically one of the most time-efficient strategies, it is a commonly used one.

Another type of strategy is an algorithm. An algorithm is a problem-solving formula that provides you with step-by-step instructions used to achieve a desired outcome (Kahneman, 2011). You can think of an algorithm as a recipe with highly detailed instructions that produce the same result every time they are performed. Algorithms are used frequently in our everyday lives, especially in computer science. When you run a search on the Internet, search engines like Google use algorithms to decide which entries will appear first in your list of results. Facebook also uses algorithms to decide which posts to display on your newsfeed. Can you identify other situations in which algorithms are used?

A heuristic is another type of problem solving strategy. While an algorithm must be followed exactly to produce a correct result, a heuristic is a general problem-solving framework (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). You can think of these as mental shortcuts that are used to solve problems. A “rule of thumb” is an example of a heuristic. Such a rule saves the person time and energy when making a decision, but despite its time-saving characteristics, it is not always the best method for making a rational decision. Different types of heuristics are used in different types of situations, but the impulse to use a heuristic occurs when one of five conditions is met (Pratkanis, 1989):

• When one is faced with too much information
• When the time to make a decision is limited
• When the decision to be made is unimportant
• When there is access to very little information to use in making the decision
• When an appropriate heuristic happens to come to mind in the same moment

Working backwards is a useful heuristic in which you begin solving the problem by focusing on the end result. Consider this example: You live in Washington, D.C. and have been invited to a wedding at 4 PM on Saturday in Philadelphia. Knowing that Interstate 95 tends to back up any day of the week, you need to plan your route and time your departure accordingly. If you want to be at the wedding service by 3:30 PM, and it takes 2.5 hours to get to Philadelphia without traffic, what time should you leave your house? You use the working backwards heuristic to plan the events of your day on a regular basis, probably without even thinking about it.

Another useful heuristic is the practice of accomplishing a large goal or task by breaking it into a series of smaller steps. Students often use this common method to complete a large research project or long essay for school. For example, students typically brainstorm, develop a thesis or main topic, research the chosen topic, organize their information into an outline, write a rough draft, revise and edit the rough draft, develop a final draft, organize the references list, and proofread their work before turning in the project. The large task becomes less overwhelming when it is broken down into a series of small steps.

Problem-solving abilities can improve with practice. Many people challenge themselves every day with puzzles and other mental exercises to sharpen their problem-solving skills. Sudoku puzzles appear daily in most newspapers. Typically, a sudoku puzzle is a 9×9 grid. The simple sudoku below ( [link] ) is a 4×4 grid. To solve the puzzle, fill in the empty boxes with a single digit: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Here are the rules: The numbers must total 10 in each bolded box, each row, and each column; however, each digit can only appear once in a bolded box, row, and column. Time yourself as you solve this puzzle and compare your time with a classmate.

How long did it take you to solve this sudoku puzzle? (You can see the answer at the end of this section.)

Here is another popular type of puzzle ( [link] ) that challenges your spatial reasoning skills. Connect all nine dots with four connecting straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper:

Did you figure it out? (The answer is at the end of this section.) Once you understand how to crack this puzzle, you won’t forget.

Take a look at the “Puzzling Scales” logic puzzle below ( [link] ). Sam Loyd, a well-known puzzle master, created and refined countless puzzles throughout his lifetime (Cyclopedia of Puzzles, n.d.).

PITFALLS TO PROBLEM SOLVING

Not all problems are successfully solved, however. What challenges stop us from successfully solving a problem? Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Imagine a person in a room that has four doorways. One doorway that has always been open in the past is now locked. The person, accustomed to exiting the room by that particular doorway, keeps trying to get out through the same doorway even though the other three doorways are open. The person is stuck—but she just needs to go to another doorway, instead of trying to get out through the locked doorway. A mental set is where you persist in approaching a problem in a way that has worked in the past but is clearly not working now.

Functional fixedness is a type of mental set where you cannot perceive an object being used for something other than what it was designed for. During the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, NASA engineers at Mission Control had to overcome functional fixedness to save the lives of the astronauts aboard the spacecraft. An explosion in a module of the spacecraft damaged multiple systems. The astronauts were in danger of being poisoned by rising levels of carbon dioxide because of problems with the carbon dioxide filters. The engineers found a way for the astronauts to use spare plastic bags, tape, and air hoses to create a makeshift air filter, which saved the lives of the astronauts.

Link to Learning

Check out this Apollo 13 scene where the group of NASA engineers are given the task of overcoming functional fixedness.

Researchers have investigated whether functional fixedness is affected by culture. In one experiment, individuals from the Shuar group in Ecuador were asked to use an object for a purpose other than that for which the object was originally intended. For example, the participants were told a story about a bear and a rabbit that were separated by a river and asked to select among various objects, including a spoon, a cup, erasers, and so on, to help the animals. The spoon was the only object long enough to span the imaginary river, but if the spoon was presented in a way that reflected its normal usage, it took participants longer to choose the spoon to solve the problem. (German & Barrett, 2005). The researchers wanted to know if exposure to highly specialized tools, as occurs with individuals in industrialized nations, affects their ability to transcend functional fixedness. It was determined that functional fixedness is experienced in both industrialized and nonindustrialized cultures (German & Barrett, 2005).

In order to make good decisions, we use our knowledge and our reasoning. Often, this knowledge and reasoning is sound and solid. Sometimes, however, we are swayed by biases or by others manipulating a situation. For example, let’s say you and three friends wanted to rent a house and had a combined target budget of $1,600. The realtor shows you only very run-down houses for $1,600 and then shows you a very nice house for $2,000. Might you ask each person to pay more in rent to get the $2,000 home? Why would the realtor show you the run-down houses and the nice house? The realtor may be challenging your anchoring bias. An anchoring bias occurs when you focus on one piece of information when making a decision or solving a problem. In this case, you’re so focused on the amount of money you are willing to spend that you may not recognize what kinds of houses are available at that price point.

The confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on information that confirms your existing beliefs. For example, if you think that your professor is not very nice, you notice all of the instances of rude behavior exhibited by the professor while ignoring the countless pleasant interactions he is involved in on a daily basis. Hindsight bias leads you to believe that the event you just experienced was predictable, even though it really wasn’t. In other words, you knew all along that things would turn out the way they did. Representative bias describes a faulty way of thinking, in which you unintentionally stereotype someone or something; for example, you may assume that your professors spend their free time reading books and engaging in intellectual conversation, because the idea of them spending their time playing volleyball or visiting an amusement park does not fit in with your stereotypes of professors.

Finally, the availability heuristic is a heuristic in which you make a decision based on an example, information, or recent experience that is that readily available to you, even though it may not be the best example to inform your decision . Biases tend to “preserve that which is already established—to maintain our preexisting knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and hypotheses” (Aronson, 1995; Kahneman, 2011). These biases are summarized in [link] .

Please visit this site to see a clever music video that a high school teacher made to explain these and other cognitive biases to his AP psychology students.

Were you able to determine how many marbles are needed to balance the scales in [link] ? You need nine. Were you able to solve the problems in [link] and [link] ? Here are the answers ( [link] ).

Many different strategies exist for solving problems. Typical strategies include trial and error, applying algorithms, and using heuristics. To solve a large, complicated problem, it often helps to break the problem into smaller steps that can be accomplished individually, leading to an overall solution. Roadblocks to problem solving include a mental set, functional fixedness, and various biases that can cloud decision making skills.

Self Check Questions

Critical thinking questions.

1. What is functional fixedness and how can overcoming it help you solve problems?

2. How does an algorithm save you time and energy when solving a problem?

Personal Application Question

3. Which type of bias do you recognize in your own decision making processes? How has this bias affected how you’ve made decisions in the past and how can you use your awareness of it to improve your decisions making skills in the future?

1. Functional fixedness occurs when you cannot see a use for an object other than the use for which it was intended. For example, if you need something to hold up a tarp in the rain, but only have a pitchfork, you must overcome your expectation that a pitchfork can only be used for garden chores before you realize that you could stick it in the ground and drape the tarp on top of it to hold it up.

2. An algorithm is a proven formula for achieving a desired outcome. It saves time because if you follow it exactly, you will solve the problem without having to figure out how to solve the problem. It is a bit like not reinventing the wheel.

• Psychology. Authored by : OpenStax College. Located at : http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:1/Psychology . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11629/latest/.

Piaget’s Theory and Stages of Cognitive Development

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Key Features

• Constructivist approach to learning : Piaget believed that children actively construct their understanding of the world rather than passively absorbing information. This emphasizes the child’s role as a “little scientist,” exploring and making sense of their environment.
• Developmental Stages : Piaget proposed four sequential stages of cognitive development, each marked by distinct thinking patterns, progressing from infancy to adolescence.
• Schemas : Schemas are mental frameworks that help individuals organize and interpret information. As children grow and learn, their schemas become more numerous and sophisticated, allowing for more complex understanding of the world.
• Assimilation : Incorporating new information into preexisting ideas and schemas.
• Accommodation : Modifying existing schemas or creating new ones to fit new information.
• Equilibration : This is how children progress through cognitive developmental stages. It involves balancing assimilation and accommodation, driving the shift from one stage of thought to the next as children encounter and resolve cognitive conflicts.

Stages of Development

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of intellectual development which reflect the increasing sophistication of children’s thought

Each child goes through the stages in the same order (but not all at the same rate), and child development is determined by biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

At each stage of development, the child’s thinking is qualitatively different from the other stages, that is, each stage involves a different type of intelligence.

Although no stage can be missed out, there are individual differences in the rate at which children progress through stages, and some individuals may never attain the later stages.

Piaget did not claim that a particular stage was reached at a certain age – although descriptions of the stages often include an indication of the age at which the average child would reach each stage.

The Sensorimotor Stage

Ages: birth to 2 years.

During the sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2) infants develop basic motor skills and learn to perceive and interact with their environment through physical sensations and body coordination.

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

• The infant learns about the world through their senses and through their actions (moving around and exploring their environment).
• During the sensorimotor stage, a range of cognitive abilities develop. These include: object permanence; self-recognition (the child realizes that other people are separate from them); deferred imitation; and representational play.
• Cognitive abilities relate to the emergence of the general symbolic function, which is the capacity to represent the world mentally
• At about 8 months, the infant will understand the permanence of objects and that they will still exist even if they can’t see them, and the infant will search for them when they disappear.

At the beginning of this stage, the infant lives in the present. It does not yet have a mental picture of the world stored in its memory, so it does not have a sense of object permanence.

If it cannot see something, then it does not exist. This is why you can hide a toy from an infant, while it watches, but it will not search for the object once it has gone out of sight.

The main achievement during this stage is object permanence – knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden. It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e., a schema) of the object.

Towards the end of this stage the general symbolic function begins to appear where children show in their play that they can use one object to stand for another. Language starts to appear because they realise that words can be used to represent objects and feelings.

The child begins to be able to store information about the world, recall it, and label it.

Individual Differences

• Cultural Practices : In some cultures, babies are carried on their mothers’ backs throughout the day. This constant physical contact and varied stimuli can influence how a child perceives their environment and their sense of object permanence.
• Gender Norms : Toys assigned to babies can differ based on gender expectations. A boy might be given more cars or action figures, while a girl might receive dolls or kitchen sets. This can influence early interactions and sensory explorations.

Learn More: The Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development

The Preoperational Stage

Ages: 2 – 7 years.

Piaget’s second stage of intellectual development is the preoperational stage , which occurs between 2 and 7 years. At the beginning of this stage, the child does not use operations (a set of logical rules), so thinking is influenced by how things look or appear to them rather than logical reasoning.

For example, a child might think a tall, thin glass contains more liquid than a short, wide glass, even if both hold the same amount, because they focus on the height rather than considering both dimensions.

Furthermore, the child is egocentric; he assumes that other people see the world as he does, as shown in the Three Mountains study.

As the preoperational stage develops, egocentrism declines, and children begin to enjoy the participation of another child in their games, and let’s pretend play becomes more important.

Toddlers often pretend to be people they are not (e.g. superheroes, policemen), and may play these roles with props that symbolize real-life objects. Children may also invent an imaginary playmate.

• Toddlers and young children acquire the ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery.
• During this stage, young children can think about things symbolically. This is the ability to make one thing, such as a word or an object, stand for something other than itself.
• A child’s thinking is dominated by how the world looks, not how the world is. It is not yet capable of logical (problem-solving) type of thought.
• Moreover, the child has difficulties with class inclusion; he can classify objects but cannot include objects in sub-sets, which involves classifying objects as belonging to two or more categories simultaneously.
• Infants at this stage also demonstrate animism. This is the tendency for the child to think that non-living objects (such as toys) have life and feelings like a person’s.

By 2 years, children have made some progress toward detaching their thoughts from the physical world. However, have not yet developed logical (or “operational”) thought characteristics of later stages.

Thinking is still intuitive (based on subjective judgments about situations) and egocentric (centered on the child’s own view of the world).

• Cultural Storytelling : Different cultures have unique stories, myths, and folklore. Children from diverse backgrounds might understand and interpret symbolic elements differently based on their cultural narratives.
• Race & Representation : A child’s racial identity can influence how they engage in pretend play. For instance, a lack of diverse representation in media and toys might lead children of color to recreate scenarios that don’t reflect their experiences or background.

Learn More: The Preoperational Stage of Cognitive Development

The Concrete Operational Stage

Ages: 7 – 11 years.

By the beginning of the concrete operational stage , the child can use operations (a set of logical rules) so they can conserve quantities, realize that people see the world in a different way (decentring), and demonstrate improvement in inclusion tasks.

Children still have difficulties with abstract thinking.

• During this stage, children begin to think logically about concrete events.
• Children begin to understand the concept of conservation; understanding that, although things may change in appearance, certain properties remain the same.
• During this stage, children can mentally reverse things (e.g., picture a ball of plasticine returning to its original shape).
• During this stage, children also become less egocentric and begin to think about how other people might think and feel.

The stage is called concrete because children can think logically much more successfully if they can manipulate real (concrete) materials or pictures of them.

Piaget considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child’s cognitive development because it marks the beginning of logical or operational thought. This means the child can work things out internally in their head (rather than physically try things out in the real world).

Children can conserve number (age 6), mass (age 7), and weight (age 9). Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes.

But operational thought is only effective here if the child is asked to reason about materials that are physically present. Children at this stage will tend to make mistakes or be overwhelmed when asked to reason about abstract or hypothetical problems.

• Cultural Context in Conservation Tasks : In a society where resources are scarce, children might demonstrate conservation skills earlier due to the cultural emphasis on preserving and reusing materials.
• Gender & Learning : Stereotypes about gender abilities, like “boys are better at math,” can influence how children approach logical problems or classify objects based on perceived gender norms.

Learn More: The Concrete Operational Stage of Development

The Formal Operational Stage

Ages: 12 and over.

The formal operational period begins at about age 11. As adolescents enter this stage, they gain the ability to think abstractly, the ability to combine and classify items in a more sophisticated way, and the capacity for higher-order reasoning.

Adolescents can think systematically and reason about what might be as well as what is (not everyone achieves this stage). This allows them to understand politics, ethics, and science fiction, as well as to engage in scientific reasoning.

Adolescents can deal with abstract ideas; for example, they can understand division and fractions without having to actually divide things up and solve hypothetical (imaginary) problems.

• Concrete operations are carried out on physical objects, whereas formal operations are carried out on ideas. Formal operational thought is entirely freed from physical and perceptual constraints.
• During this stage, adolescents can deal with abstract ideas (e.g., they no longer need to think about slicing up cakes or sharing sweets to understand division and fractions).
• They can follow the form of an argument without having to think in terms of specific examples.
• Adolescents can deal with hypothetical problems with many possible solutions. For example, if asked, ‘What would happen if money were abolished in one hour?’ they could speculate about many possible consequences.
• Piaget described reflective abstraction as the process by which individuals become aware of and reflect upon their own cognitive actions or operations (metacognition).

From about 12 years, children can follow the form of a logical argument without reference to its content. During this time, people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts, and logically test hypotheses.

This stage sees the emergence of scientific thinking, formulating abstract theories and hypotheses when faced with a problem.

• Culture & Abstract Thinking : Cultures emphasize different kinds of logical or abstract thinking. For example, in societies with a strong oral tradition, the ability to hold complex narratives might develop prominently.
• Gender & Ethics : Discussions about morality and ethics can be influenced by gender norms. For instance, in some cultures, girls might be encouraged to prioritize community harmony, while boys might be encouraged to prioritize individual rights.

Learn More: The Formal Operational Stage of Development

Piaget’s Theory

• Piaget’s theory places a strong emphasis on the active role that children play in their own cognitive development.
• According to Piaget, children are not passive recipients of information; instead, they actively explore and interact with their surroundings.
• This active engagement with the environment is crucial because it allows them to gradually build their understanding of the world.

1. How Piaget Developed the Theory

Piaget was employed at the Binet Institute in the 1920s, where his job was to develop French versions of questions on English intelligence tests. He became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers to the questions that required logical thinking.

He believed that these incorrect answers revealed important differences between the thinking of adults and children.

Piaget branched out on his own with a new set of assumptions about children’s intelligence:

• Children’s intelligence differs from an adult’s in quality rather than in quantity. This means that children reason (think) differently from adults and see the world in different ways.
• Children actively build up their knowledge about the world . They are not passive creatures waiting for someone to fill their heads with knowledge.
• The best way to understand children’s reasoning is to see things from their point of view.

Piaget did not want to measure how well children could count, spell or solve problems as a way of grading their I.Q. What he was more interested in was the way in which fundamental concepts like the very idea of number , time, quantity, causality , justice , and so on emerged.

Piaget studied children from infancy to adolescence using naturalistic observation of his own three babies and sometimes controlled observation too. From these, he wrote diary descriptions charting their development.

He also used clinical interviews and observations of older children who were able to understand questions and hold conversations.

2. Piaget’s Theory Differs From Others In Several Ways:

Piaget’s (1936, 1950) theory of cognitive development explains how a child constructs a mental model of the world.

He disagreed with the idea that intelligence was a fixed trait, and regarded cognitive development as a process that occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

Children’s ability to understand, think about, and solve problems in the world develops in a stop-start, discontinuous manner (rather than gradual changes over time).

• It is concerned with children, rather than all learners.
• It focuses on development, rather than learning per se, so it does not address learning of information or specific behaviors.
• It proposes discrete stages of development, marked by qualitative differences, rather than a gradual increase in number and complexity of behaviors, concepts, ideas, etc.

The goal of the theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses.

To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience.

Children construct an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.

A schema is a mental framework or concept that helps us organize and interpret information. It’s like a mental file folder where we store knowledge about a particular object, event, or concept.

According to Piaget (1952), schemas are fundamental building blocks of cognitive development. They are constantly being created, modified, and reorganized as we interact with the world.

Wadsworth (2004) suggests that schemata (the plural of schema) be thought of as “index cards” filed in the brain, each one telling an individual how to react to incoming stimuli or information.

According to Piaget, we are born with a few primitive schemas, such as sucking, which give us the means to interact with the world. These initial schemas are physical, but as the child develops, they become mental schemas.

For example:

• Babies have a sucking reflex, triggered by something touching their lips. This corresponds to a “sucking schema.”
• The grasping reflex, elicited when something touches the palm of a baby’s hand, represents another innate schema.
• The rooting reflex, where a baby turns its head towards something which touches its cheek, is also considered an innate schema.

When Piaget discussed the development of a person’s mental processes, he referred to increases in the number and complexity of the schemata that the person had learned.

When a child’s existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can perceive around it, it is said to be in a state of equilibrium, i.e., a state of cognitive (i.e., mental) balance.

Operations are more sophisticated mental structures that allow us to combine schemas in a logical (reasonable) way. For example, picking up a rattle would combine three schemas, gazing, reaching and grasping.

As children grow, they can carry out more complex operations and begin to imagine hypothetical (imaginary) situations.

Operations are learned through interaction with other people and the environment, and they represent a key advancement in cognitive development beyond simple schemas.

As children grow and interact with their environment, these basic schemas become more complex and numerous, and new schemas are developed through the processes of assimilation and accommodation .

4. The Process of Adaptation

Piaget (1952) believed child development results from maturation and environmental interaction. Adaptation is the process of changing mental models to match reality, achieved through assimilation and accommodation.

• Assimilation is fitting new information into existing schemas without changing one’s understanding. For example,  a child who has only seen small dogs might call a cat a “dog” due to similar features like fur, four legs, and a tail.
• Accommodation occurs when existing schemas must be revised to incorporate new information. For instance, a child who believes all animals have four legs would need to accommodate their schema upon seeing a snake. A baby tries to use the same grasping schema to pick up a very small object. It doesn’t work. The baby then changes the schema using the forefinger and thumb to pick up the object.

When schemas explain our perceptions, we’re in equilibration. New, unexplainable situations create disequilibrium, motivating learning. This cognitive conflict, where contradictory views exist, drives development.

Piaget viewed intellectual growth as an adaptation to the world through assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration. These processes are continuous and interactive, allowing schemas to evolve and become more sophisticated.

Jean Piaget (1952; see also Wadsworth, 2004) viewed intellectual growth as a process of adaptation (adjustment) to the world. This happens through assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration.

5. Equilibration

Piaget (1985) believed that all human thought seeks order and is uncomfortable with contradictions and inconsistencies in knowledge structures. In other words, we seek “equilibrium” in our cognitive structures.

Equilibrium occurs when a child’s schemas can deal with most new information through assimilation. However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).

Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds. Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation).

Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it.

Equilibration is a regulatory process that maintains a balance between assimilation and accommodation to facilitate cognitive growth. Think of it this way: We can’t merely assimilate all the time; if we did, we would never learn any new concepts or principles.

Everything new we encountered would just get put in the same few “slots” we already had. Neither can we accommodate all the time; if we did, everything we encountered would seem new; there would be no recurring regularities in our world. We’d be exhausted by the mental effort!

Applications to Education

Think of old black-and-white films you’ve seen where children sat in rows at desks with inkwells. They learned by rote, all chanting in unison in response to questions set by an authoritarian figure like Miss Trunchbull in Matilda.

Children who were unable to keep up were seen as slacking and would be punished by variations on the theme of corporal punishment. Yes, it really did happen and in some parts of the world still does today.

Piaget is partly responsible for the change that occurred in the 1960s and for your relatively pleasurable and pain-free school days!

“Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly”. Piaget (1972, p. 27)

Plowden Report

Piaget (1952) did not explicitly relate his theory to education, although later researchers have explained how features of Piaget’s theory can be applied to teaching and learning.

Piaget has been extremely influential in developing educational policy and teaching practice. For example, a review of primary education by the UK government in 1966 was based strongly on Piaget’s theory. The result of this review led to the publication of the Plowden Report (1967).

In the 1960s the Plowden Committee investigated the deficiencies in education and decided to incorporate many of Piaget’s ideas into its final report published in 1967, even though Piaget’s work was not really designed for education.

The report makes three Piaget-associated recommendations:

• Children should be given individual attention and it should be realized that they need to be treated differently.
• Children should only be taught things that they are capable of learning
• Children mature at different rates and the teacher needs to be aware of the stage of development of each child so teaching can be tailored to their individual needs.

The report’s recurring themes are individual learning, flexibility in the curriculum, the centrality of play in children’s learning, the use of the environment, learning by discovery and the importance of the evaluation of children’s progress – teachers should “not assume that only what is measurable is valuable.”

Discovery learning, the idea that children learn best through doing and actively exploring, was seen as central to the transformation of the primary school curriculum.

How to teach

Learning should be student-centered and accomplished through active discovery in the classroom. The teacher’s role is to facilitate learning rather than direct tuition.

Because Piaget’s theory is based upon biological maturation and stages, the notion of “readiness” is important. Readiness concerns when certain information or concepts should be taught.

According to Piaget’s theory, children should not be taught certain concepts until they have reached the appropriate stage of cognitive development.

Consequently, education should be stage-specific, with curricula developed to match the age and stage of thinking of the child. For example, abstract concepts like algebra or atomic structure are not suitable for primary school children.

Assimilation and accommodation require an active learner, not a passive one, because problem-solving skills cannot be taught, they must be discovered (Piaget, 1958).

Therefore, teachers should encourage the following within the classroom:

• Consider the stages of cognitive development : Educational programs should be designed to correspond to Piaget’s stages of development. For example, a child in the concrete operational stage should not be taught abstract concepts and should be given concrete aid such as tokens to count with.
• Provide concrete experiences before abstract concepts : Especially for younger children, ensure they have hands-on experiences with concepts before introducing more abstract representations.
• Provide challenges that promote growth without causing frustration : Devising situations that present useful problems and create disequilibrium in the child.
• Focus on the process of learning rather than the end product : Instead of checking if children have the right answer, the teacher should focus on the students’ understanding and the processes they used to arrive at the answer.
• Encourage active learning : Learning must be active (discovery learning). Children should be encouraged to discover for themselves and to interact with the material instead of being given ready-made knowledge. Using active methods that require rediscovering or reconstructing “truths.”
• Foster social interaction: Using collaborative, as well as individual activities (so children can learn from each other). Implement cooperative learning activities, such as group problem-solving tasks or role-playing scenarios.
• Differentiated teaching : Adapt lessons to suit the needs of the individual child. For example, observe a child’s ability to classify objects by color, shape, and size. If they can easily sort by one attribute but struggle with multiple attributes, tailor future activities to gradually increase complexity, such as sorting buttons first by color, then by color and size together.
• Providing support for the “spontaneous research” of the child : Provide opportunities and resources for children to explore topics of their own interest, encouraging their natural curiosity and self-directed learning. Create a “Wonder Wall” in the classroom where children can post questions about topics that interest them. 

Classroom Activities

Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years):.

Although most kids in this age range are not in a traditional classroom setting, they can still benefit from games that stimulate their senses and motor skills.

• Object Permanence Games : Play peek-a-boo or hide toys under a blanket to help babies understand that objects still exist even when they can’t see them.
• Sensory Play : Activities like water play, sand play, or playdough encourage exploration through touch.
• Imitation : Children at this age love to imitate adults. Use imitation as a way to teach new skills.

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years):

• Role Playing : Set up pretend play areas where children can act out different scenarios, such as a kitchen, hospital, or market.
• Use of Symbols : Encourage drawing, building, and using props to represent other things.
• Hands-on Activities : Children should interact physically with their environment, so provide plenty of opportunities for hands-on learning.
• Egocentrism Activities : Use exercises that highlight different perspectives. For instance, having two children sit across from each other with an object in between and asking them what the other sees.

Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years):

• Classification Tasks : Provide objects or pictures to group, based on various characteristics.
• Hands-on Experiments : Introduce basic science experiments where they can observe cause and effect, like a simple volcano with baking soda and vinegar.
• Logical Games : Board games, puzzles, and logic problems help develop their thinking skills.
• Conservation Tasks : Use experiments to showcase that quantity doesn’t change with alterations in shape, such as the classic liquid conservation task using differently shaped glasses.

Formal Operational Stage (11 years and older):

• Hypothesis Testing : Encourage students to make predictions and test them out.
• Abstract Thinking : Introduce topics that require abstract reasoning, such as algebra or ethical dilemmas.
• Problem Solving : Provide complex problems and have students work on solutions, integrating various subjects and concepts.
• Debate and Discussion : Encourage group discussions and debates on abstract topics, highlighting the importance of logic and evidence.
• Feedback and Questioning : Use open-ended questions to challenge students and promote higher-order thinking. For instance, rather than asking, “Is this the right answer?”, ask, “How did you arrive at this conclusion?”

While Piaget’s stages offer a foundational framework, they are not universally experienced in the same way by all children.

Social identities play a critical role in shaping cognitive development, necessitating a more nuanced and culturally responsive approach to understanding child development.

Piaget’s stages may manifest differently based on social identities like race, gender, and culture:

• Race & Teacher Interactions : A child’s race can influence teacher expectations and interactions. For example, racial biases can lead to children of color being perceived as less capable or more disruptive, influencing their cognitive challenges and support.
• Racial and Cultural Stereotypes : These can affect a child’s self-perception and self-efficacy . For instance, stereotypes about which racial or cultural groups are “better” at certain subjects can influence a child’s self-confidence and, subsequently, their engagement in that subject.
• Gender & Peer Interactions : Children learn gender roles from their peers. Boys might be mocked for playing “girl games,” and girls might be excluded from certain activities, influencing their cognitive engagements.
• Language : Multilingual children might navigate the stages differently, especially if their home language differs from their school language. The way concepts are framed in different languages can influence cognitive processing. Cultural idioms and metaphors can shape a child’s understanding of concepts and their ability to use symbolic representation, especially in the pre-operational stage.

Overcoming Challenges and Barriers to Implementation

Balancing play and curriculum.

• Purposeful Play: Ensuring that play is not just free time but a structured learning experience requires careful planning. Educators must identify clear learning objectives and create play environments that facilitate these goals.  
• Alignment with Standards: Striking a balance between child-initiated play and curriculum expectations can be challenging. Educators need to find ways to integrate play-based learning with broader educational goals and standards.
• Pace of Learning: The curriculum’s focus on specific content by certain ages can create pressure to accelerate student learning, potentially contradicting Piaget’s notion of developmental stages. Teachers should regularly assess students’ understanding to identify areas where they need more support or challenge.
• Assessment Focus: The emphasis on standardized testing can shift the focus from process-oriented learning (as Piaget advocated) to outcome-based teaching. Educators should use assessments that reflect real-world tasks and allow students to demonstrate their understanding in multiple ways.
• Parental Expectations: Some parents may have misconceptions about play-based learning, believing it to be less rigorous than traditional instruction. Educators may need to address these concerns and communicate the value of play. 
• Parental Involvement: Involving parents in understanding Piaget’s theory can foster consistency between home and school environments. Providing resources and information to parents about child development can empower them to support their child’s learning at home.

Other challenges

• Individual Differences: Piaget emphasized individual differences in cognitive development, but classrooms often have diverse learners. Meeting the needs of all students while maintaining a play-based approach can be demanding.
• Time Constraints: In some educational settings, there may be pressure to cover specific content or prepare students for standardized tests. Prioritizing play-based learning within these constraints can be difficult.    
• Cultural Sensitivity: Recognizing and respecting cultural differences is essential. Piaget’s theory may need to be adapted to fit the specific cultural context of the children being taught.

Can Piaget’s Ideas Be Applied to Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities?

Yes, Piaget’s ideas can be adapted to support children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), though with important considerations:

• Individualized Approach : Tailor learning experiences to each child’s unique strengths, needs, and interests, recognizing that development may not follow typical patterns or timelines (Daniels & Diack, 1977).
• Concrete Learning Experiences : Provide hands-on, multisensory activities to support concept exploration, particularly beneficial for children with learning difficulties or sensory impairments (Lee & Zentall, 2012).
• Gradual Scaffolding : Break down tasks into manageable steps and provide appropriate support to help children progress through developmental stages at their own pace (Morra & Borella, 2015).
• Flexible Assessment : Modify Piagetian tasks to accommodate different abilities and communication methods, using multiple assessment approaches.
• Strengths-Based Focus : Emphasize children’s capabilities rather than deficits, using Piaget’s concepts to identify and build upon existing cognitive strengths.
• Interdisciplinary Approach : Combine Piagetian insights with specialized knowledge from fields like occupational therapy and speech-language pathology.

While Piaget’s theory offers valuable insights, it should be part of a broader, evidence-based approach that recognizes the diverse factors influencing development in children with SEND.

Social Media (Digital Learning)

Jean Piaget could not have anticipated the expansive digital age we now live in.

Today, knowledge dissemination and creation are democratized by the Internet, with platforms like blogs, wikis, and social media allowing for vast collaboration and shared knowledge. This development has prompted a reimagining of the future of education.

Classrooms, traditionally seen as primary sites of learning, are being overshadowed by the rise of mobile technologies and platforms like MOOCs (Passey, 2013).

The millennial generation, the first to grow up with cable TV, the internet, and cell phones, relies heavily on technology.

They view it as an integral part of their identity, with most using it extensively in their daily lives, from keeping in touch with loved ones to consuming news and entertainment (Nielsen, 2014).

Social media platforms offer a dynamic environment conducive to Piaget’s principles. These platforms allow interactions that nurture knowledge evolution through cognitive processes like assimilation and accommodation.

They emphasize communal interaction and shared activity, fostering both cognitive and socio-cultural constructivism. This shared activity promotes understanding and exploration beyond individual perspectives, enhancing social-emotional learning (Gehlbach, 2010).

A standout advantage of social media in an educational context is its capacity to extend beyond traditional classroom confines. As the material indicates, these platforms can foster more inclusive learning, bridging diverse learner groups.

This inclusivity can equalize learning opportunities, potentially diminishing biases based on factors like race or socio-economic status, resonating with Kegan’s (1982) concept of “recruitability.”

However, there are challenges. While social media’s potential in learning is vast, its practical application necessitates intention and guidance. Cuban, Kirkpatrick, and Peck (2001) note that certain educators and students are hesitant about integrating social media into educational contexts.

This hesitancy can stem from technological complexities or potential distractions. Yet, when harnessed effectively, social media can provide a rich environment for collaborative learning and interpersonal development, fostering a deeper understanding of content.

In essence, the rise of social media aligns seamlessly with constructivist philosophies. Social media platforms act as tools for everyday cognition, merging daily social interactions with the academic world, and providing avenues for diverse, interactive, and engaging learning experiences.

Criticisms of Jean Piaget’s Theories and Concepts

Criticisms of research methods.

• Small sample size : Piaget often used small, non-representative samples, frequently including only his own children or those from similar backgrounds (European children from families of high socio-economic status). This limits the generalizability of his findings (Lourenço & Machado, 1996).

The lack of inter-rater reliability and potential issues with clinical interviews (e.g., children misunderstanding questions or trying to please the experimenter) may have led to biased or inaccurate conclusions.

Using multiple researchers and more standardized methods could have improved reliability (Donaldson, 1978).

• Age-related issues : Some critics argue that Piaget underestimated the cognitive abilities of younger children. This may be due to the complex language used in his tasks, which could have masked children’s true understanding.
• Cultural limitations : Piaget’s research was primarily conducted with Western, educated children from relatively affluent backgrounds. This raises questions about the universality of his developmental stages across different cultures (Rogoff, 2003).

As several studies have shown Piaget underestimated the abilities of children because his tests were sometimes confusing or difficult to understand (e.g., Hughes , 1975).

Challenges to Key Concepts and Theories

Fixed developmental stages.

Are the stages real? Vygotsky and Bruner would rather not talk about stages at all, preferring to see development as a continuous process.

Others have queried the age ranges of the stages. Some studies have shown that progress to the formal operational stage is not guaranteed.

For example, Keating (1979) reported that 40-60% of college students fail at formal operational tasks, and Dasen (1994) states that only one-third of adults ever reach the formal operational stage.

Current developmental psychology has moved beyond seeing development as progressing through discrete, universal stages (as Piaget proposed) to view it as a more gradual, variable process influenced by social, genetic, and cultural factors.

Current perspectives acknowledge greater variability in the timing and sequence of developmental milestones.

There’s greater recognition of the brain’s plasticity and the potential for cognitive growth throughout the lifespan.

This challenges the idea of fixed developmental endpoints proposed in stage theories.

Culture and individual differences

The fact that the formal operational stage is not reached in all cultures and not all individuals within cultures suggests that it might not be biologically based.

• According to Piaget, the rate of cognitive development cannot be accelerated as it is based on biological processes however, direct tuition can speed up the development which suggests that it is not entirely based on biological factors.
• Because Piaget concentrated on the universal stages of cognitive development and biological maturation, he failed to consider the effect that the social setting and culture may have on cognitive development.

Cross-cultural studies show that the stages of development (except the formal operational stage) occur in the same order in all cultures suggesting that cognitive development is a product of a biological maturation process.

However, the age at which the stages are reached varies between cultures and individuals which suggests that social and cultural factors and individual differences influence cognitive development.

Dasen (1994) cites studies he conducted in remote parts of the central Australian desert with 8—to 14-year-old Indigenous Australians.

He gave them conservation of liquid tasks and spatial awareness tasks. He found that the ability to conserve came later in the Aboriginal children, between the ages of 10 and 13 (as opposed to between 5 and 7, with Piaget’s Swiss sample).

However, he found that spatial awareness abilities developed earlier among Aboriginal children than among Swiss children.

Such a study demonstrates that cognitive development is not purely dependent on maturation but on cultural factors as well—spatial awareness is crucial for nomadic groups of people.

Underemphasis on social and emotional factors

While Piaget’s theory focuses primarily on individual cognitive development, it arguably underestimates the crucial role of social and emotional factors.

Lev Vygotsky , a contemporary of Piaget, emphasized the social nature of learning in his sociocultural theory.

Vygotsky argued that cognitive development occurs through social interactions, particularly with more knowledgeable others (MKOs) such as parents, teachers, or skilled peers.

He introduced the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development ( ZPD ), which represents the gap between what a child can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance.

Furthermore, Vygotsky viewed language as fundamental to thought development, asserting that social dialogue becomes internalized as inner speech, driving cognitive processes. This perspective highlights how cultural tools, especially language, shape thinking.

Emotional factors, including motivation, self-esteem, and relationships, also play significant roles in learning and development – aspects not thoroughly addressed in Piaget’s cognitive-focused theory.

This social-emotional dimension of development has gained increasing recognition in modern educational and developmental psychology.

Underestimating children’s abilities

Piaget failed to distinguish between competence (what a child can do) and performance (what a child can show when given a particular task).

When tasks were altered, performance (and therefore competence) was affected. Therefore, Piaget might have underestimated children’s cognitive abilities.

For example, a child might have object permanence (competence) but still be unable to search for objects (performance). When Piaget hid objects from babies, he found that it wasn’t until after nine months that they looked for them.

However, Piaget relied on manual search methods – whether the child was looking for the object or not.

Later, researchers such as Baillargeon and Devos (1991) reported that infants as young as four months looked longer at a moving carrot that didn’t do what it expected, suggesting they had some sense of permanence, otherwise they wouldn’t have had any expectation of what it should or shouldn’t do.

Jean Piaget’s Legacy and Ongoing Influence

Piaget’s ideas on developmental psychology have had an enormous influence. He changed how people viewed the child’s world and their methods of studying children.

He inspired many who followed and took up his ideas. Piaget’s ideas have generated a huge amount of research, which has increased our understanding of cognitive development.

• Seminal Theory : Piaget (1936) was one of the first psychologists to study cognitive development systematically. His contributions include a stage theory of child cognitive development, detailed observational studies of cognition in children, and a series of simple but ingenious tests to reveal different cognitive abilities.
• Neo-Piagetian theories : Researchers have built upon Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development, incorporating information processing and brain development to explain cognitive growth, emphasizing individual differences and more gradual developmental progressions (Case, 1985; Fischer, 1980; Pascual-Leone, 1970).

Impact on Educational Practices

Early Childhood Education : Piaget’s theories underpin many early childhood programs that emphasize play-based learning, sensory experiences, and exploration.

Constructivist Pedagogy: Piaget’s idea that children construct knowledge through interaction with their environment led to a shift from teacher-centered to child-centered approaches. This emphasizes exploration, discovery, and hands-on activities.

By understanding Piaget’s stages, educators can create environments and activities that challenge children appropriately.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children ( NAEYC ) has incorporated Piagetian principles into its DAP framework, influencing early childhood education policies worldwide.

Parenting Practices

Piaget’s theory influenced parenting by emphasizing stimulating environments, play, and supporting children’s curiosity.

Parents can use Piaget’s stages to have realistic developmental expectations of their children’s behavior and cognitive capabilities.

For instance, understanding that a toddler is in the pre-operational stage can help parents be patient when the child is egocentric.

Play Activities

Recognizing the importance of play in cognitive development, many parents provide toys and games suited for their child’s developmental stage.

Parents can offer activities that are slightly beyond their child’s current abilities, leveraging Vygotsky’s concept of the “ Zone of Proximal Development ,” which complements Piaget’s ideas.

• Peek-a-boo : Helps with object permanence.
• Texture Touch : Provide different textured materials (soft, rough, bumpy, smooth) for babies to touch and feel.
• Sound Bottles : Fill small bottles with different items like rice, beans, bells, and have children shake and listen to the different sounds.
• Memory Games : Using cards with pictures, place them face down, and ask students to find matching pairs.
• Role Playing and Pretend Play : Let children act out roles or stories that enhance symbolic thinking. Encourage symbolic play with dress-up clothes, playsets, or toy cash registers. Provide prompts or scenarios to extend their imagination.
• Story Sequencing : Give children cards with parts of a story and have them arranged in the correct order.
• Number Line Jumps : Create a number line on the floor with tape. Ask students to jump to the correct answer for math problems.
• Classification Games : Provide a mix of objects and ask students to classify them based on different criteria (e.g., color, size, shape).
• Logical Puzzle Games : Games that involve problem-solving using logic, such as simple Sudoku puzzles or logic grid puzzles.
• Debate and Discussion : Provide a topic and let students debate the pros and cons. This promotes abstract thinking and logical reasoning.
• Hypothesis Testing Games : Present a scenario and have students come up with hypotheses and ways to test them.
• Strategy Board Games : Games like chess, checkers, or Settlers of Catan can help in developing strategic and forward-thinking skills.

Comparing Jean Piaget’s Ideas with Other Theorists

Integrating diverse theories enables early years professionals to develop a comprehensive view of child development.

This allows for creating holistic learning experiences that support cognitive, social, and emotional growth.

By recognizing various developmental factors, professionals can tailor their practices to each child’s unique needs and background.

Comparison with Lev Vygotsky

Differences:.

• Stage-Based vs Continuous Development : Piaget proposed a stage-based model of cognitive development, while Vygotsky viewed development as a continuous process influenced by social and cultural factors.
• Role of Language : For Piaget, language is considered secondary to action, i.e., thought precedes language. Vygotsky argues that the development of language and thought go together and that the origin of reasoning has more to do with our ability to communicate with others than with our interaction with the material world.

Similarities:

• Both theories view children as actively constructing their own knowledge of the world; they are not seen as just passively absorbing knowledge.
• They also agree that cognitive development involves qualitative changes in thinking, not only a matter of learning more things.

Comparison with Erik Erikson

Erikson’s (1958) psychosocial theory outlines 8 stages of psychosocial development from infancy to late adulthood.

At each stage, individuals face a conflict between two opposing states that shapes personality. Successfully resolving conflicts leads to virtues like hope, will, purpose, and integrity. Failure leads to outcomes like mistrust, guilt, role confusion, and despair.

• Cognitive vs. Psychosocial Focus : Piaget focuses on cognitive development and how children construct knowledge. Erikson emphasizes psychosocial development, exploring how social interactions shape personality and identity.
• Universal Stages vs. Cultural Influence : Piaget proposed universal cognitive stages relatively independent of culture. Erikson’s psychosocial stages, while sequential, acknowledge significant cultural influence on their expression and timing.
• Role of Conflict : Piaget sees cognitive conflict (disequilibrium) as a driver for learning. Erikson views psychosocial crises as essential for personal growth and identity formation.
• Scope of Development : Piaget’s theory primarily covers childhood to adolescence. Erikson’s theory spans the entire lifespan, from infancy to late adulthood.
• Learning Process vs. Identity Formation : Piaget emphasizes how children learn and understand the world. Erikson focuses on how individuals develop their sense of self and place in society through resolving psychosocial conflicts.
• Stage-based theories : Both propose that development occurs in distinct stages  (Gilleard & Higgs, 2016).
• Age-related progression : Stages are generally associated with specific age ranges.
• Cumulative development : Each stage builds upon the previous ones.
• Focus on childhood : Both emphasize the importance of early life experiences.
• Active role of the individual : Both see children as active participants in their development.

Comparison with Urie Bronfenbrenner

Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory posits that an individual’s development is influenced by a series of interconnected environmental systems, ranging from the immediate surroundings (e.g., family) to broad societal structures (e.g., culture).

Bronfenbrenner’s theory offers a more comprehensive view of the multiple influences on a child’s development, complementing Piaget’s focus on cognitive processes with a broader ecological perspective.

• Individual vs. Ecological Emphasis : Piaget focuses on individual cognitive development through independent exploration. Bronfenbrenner emphasizes the complex interplay between an individual and multiple environmental systems, from immediate family to broader societal influences.
• Stage-based vs. Systems Approach : Piaget proposed distinct stages of cognitive development. Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory views development as ongoing interactions between the individual and various environmental contexts throughout the lifespan.
• Role of Environment : For Piaget, the environment provides opportunities for cognitive conflict and schema development. Bronfenbrenner sees the environment as a nested set of systems (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, chronosystem) that directly and indirectly influence development.
• Cognitive Structures vs. Proximal Processes : Piaget focused on the development of cognitive structures (schemas). Bronfenbrenner emphasized proximal processes – regular, enduring interactions between the individual and their immediate environment – as key drivers of development.
• Discovery Learning vs. Contextual Learning : Piaget advocated for discovery learning to challenge existing schemas. Bronfenbrenner would emphasize the importance of understanding and leveraging the various ecological contexts in which learning occurs, from family to cultural systems.
• Both recognize the child as an active participant in development.
• Both acknowledge the importance of the child’s environment in shaping development.

What is cognitive development?

Cognitive development is how a person’s ability to think, learn, remember, problem-solve, and make decisions changes over time.

This includes the growth and maturation of the brain, as well as the acquisition and refinement of various mental skills and abilities.

Cognitive development is a major aspect of human development, and both genetic and environmental factors heavily influence it. Key domains of cognitive development include attention, memory, language skills, logical reasoning, and problem-solving.

Various theories, such as those proposed by Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, provide different perspectives on how this complex process unfolds from infancy through adulthood.

What are the 4 stages of Piaget’s theory?

Piaget divided children’s cognitive development into four stages; each of the stages represents a new way of thinking and understanding the world.

He called them (1) sensorimotor intelligence , (2) preoperational thinking , (3) concrete operational thinking , and (4) formal operational thinking . Each stage is correlated with an age period of childhood, but only approximately.

According to Piaget, intellectual development takes place through stages that occur in a fixed order and which are universal (all children pass through these stages regardless of social or cultural background).

Development can only occur when the brain has matured to a point of “readiness”.

What are some of the weaknesses of Piaget’s theory?

However, the age at which the stages are reached varies between cultures and individuals, suggesting that social and cultural factors and individual differences influence cognitive development.

What are Piaget’s concepts of schemas?

Schemas are mental structures that contain all of the information relating to one aspect of the world around us.

According to Piaget, we are born with a few primitive schemas, such as sucking, which give us the means to interact with the world.

These are physical, but as the child develops, they become mental schemas. These schemas become more complex with experience.

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• Erickson, E. H. (1958).  Young man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history . New York: Norton.
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• Guy-Evans, O. (2024, January 17). Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory . Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/bronfenbrenner.html
• Hughes, M. (1975). Egocentrism in preschool children . Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Edinburgh University.
• Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence . New York: Basic Books.
• Keating, D. (1979). Adolescent thinking. In J. Adelson (Ed.), Handbook of adolescent psychology (pp. 211-246). New York: Wiley.
• Kegan, R. (1982).  The evolving self: Problem and process in human development . Harvard University Press.
• Lee, K., & Zentall, S. S. (2012). Psychostimulant and sensory stimulation interventions that target the reading and math deficits of students with ADHD. Journal of Attention Disorders, 16 (4), 308-329.
• Nielsen. 2014. “Millennials: Technology = Social Connection.” http://www.nielsen.com/content/corporate/us/en/insights/news/2014/millennials-technology-social-connecti on.html.
• Lourenço, O. (2012). Piaget and Vygotsky: Many resemblances, and a crucial difference. New Ideas in Psychology, 30 (3), 281-295.
• Lourenço, O., & Machado, A. (1996). In defense of Piaget’s theory: A reply to 10 common criticisms. Psychological Review, 103 (1), 143-164.
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Further Reading

• BBC Radio Broadcast about the Three Mountains Study
• Piagetian stages: A critical review
• Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory

• Relationships

The 5 Stages of a Breakup

Relationships often fall apart in similar ways..

Updated August 30, 2024 | Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano

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Have you ever felt that a relationship was slipping away but couldn’t pinpoint when or why it started? Relationships, much like living organisms, have a life cycle that includes phases of growth and decline.

According to Knapp’s relationship model , there are five stages of relationship dissolution. Each stage in the gradual disintegration of a relationship is marked by changes in communication, emotional intimacy , and mutual investment.

Here are the five stages of "coming apart," leading to the end of a relationship:

1. Differentiating

The first stage involves noticing and highlighting differences between partners. Conflicts may arise more frequently as partners emphasize what sets them apart rather than what unites them.

The communication in this stage shifts from “we” to “I,” and partners may begin to express desires for autonomy or personal space . What was once seen as endearing or insignificant may now become a source of irritation or conflict.

This stage doesn’t necessarily spell the end of a relationship. It can also be a natural and healthy phase in which partners reassess their individual needs within the relationship. However, if left unresolved, it can lead to further deterioration. For instance, partners may fight over conflicting life goals or values that were previously overlooked.

Additionally, a 2017 study from Emerging Adulthood shows that, especially between the ages of 18 to 24, a higher number of stressful life events, such as changes in domains of work, relationships, individual goals, and financial stability, can cause partners to withdraw from each other.

The authors of the abovementioned study from Emerging Adulthood —Ann Lantagne, Wyndol Furman, and Jamie Novak—illustrate how the seeds of discontent are first sown: “Antagonism, criticism, and conflict may accumulate across time and gradually lead to the deterioration of the relationship. Negative interactions that arise because of an individual’s characteristics, such as insensitivity, an unwillingness to compromise, or untrustworthiness, may also have a long-term impact on a relationship because they may be difficult to change.”

2. Circumscribing

In the circumscribing stage, communication continues to deteriorate in quality and quantity, but more deliberately than before. Partners begin to limit their interactions and avoid discussing sensitive topics.

The relationship becomes more superficial, and couples begin spending less time together, experiencing both positive and negative feelings towards one another, which can add to confusion about whether or not staying together is for the best.

The emotional distance grows as partners refrain from sharing their thoughts and feelings. The relationship becomes more about maintaining the status quo than about genuine connection. For instance, conversations may be limited to logistical topics like household chores or schedules.

“At some point, it was cold between us. A distance began to form. We no longer had the usual topics of conversation. The divorce was essentially a final stop in a process that had started years before. I live in my world, and she lives in hers,” writes Dan, a participant in a recent study examining the reasons behind late-life divorces.

3. Stagnating

The stagnating stage marks the relationship coming to a standstill. Communication is infrequent, and, when it does occur, it often feels forced or strained. Both partners might feel stuck in the relationship, unsure of how to move forward but also hesitant to end it.

“I do not know what path to take; if I should try and force this relationship to work and be present enough to support her in herself healing her traumas while working to be a better partner, which I know will take sweat and blood, or if I should cut ties and give her my sincerity and best wishes,” writes one Reddit user, highlighting the struggles of stagnation.

During this stage, there is often a sense of resignation or hopelessness. The relationship no longer grows or evolves, and partners find themselves just going through the motions. The relationship may continue out of habit, convenience, or a fear of change, but there is little to no effort to improve or revive the connection.

4. Avoiding

In this stage, partners actively seek to put distance between themselves, both physically and emotionally. The avoidance can be subtle, such as spending more time apart, or more direct, such as avoiding phone calls, texts, or any form of interaction.

This stage often involves one or both partners withdrawing from the relationship to the point where they are almost living separate lives. Their emotional connection is severely weakened or absent, and the relationship may feel like it’s already over, even if no formal decision has been made.

Avoidance can manifest in different ways, including creating physical space, such as sleeping in separate rooms, or emotional space, such as avoiding eye contact or meaningful conversation. Partners might stay out late, leave early, or avoid being home when the other is there, deliberately minimizing the time they spend together.

5. Terminating

The final stage involves the end of the relationship through a formal breakup or divorce. Communication here primarily revolves around finalizing separation, dealing with the emotional aftermath, and seeking closure.

A couple might have a final conversation to discuss their breakup, agreeing on how to handle shared responsibilities, possessions, or living situations. They may also attempt to reflect on the relationship and understand what went wrong.

Emotions during this stage can range from sadness and grief to relief and acceptance , depending on the situation. Partners may take significant steps such as moving out, cutting off all contact, and letting their friends and family know about the breakup. Here, they begin the process of moving on with their lives.

Knapp’s “coming apart” stages highlight the complex and often painful process of relationship dissolution. Understanding the stages can help couples navigate their relationships more mindfully. Learning to recognize signs of relationship decline can encourage them to take proactive steps to repair the relationship or prepare for a healthy separation.

A version of this post also appears on Forbes.com.

Mark Travers, Ph.D., is an American psychologist with degrees from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder.

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