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Creative Insight: The Redistribution Theory 101

explore mutually exclusive options (buy house X vs. buy house Y ) and saves
us, when consequences are costly, from having to pay the price of our poor
judgment. To think analytically is, in part, to carry out actions in the mind
before we carry them out in the flesh.

Inference
Many cognitive operations do not have counterparts among physical actions.
If somebody is told that some object O is smaller than O , which in turn is
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smaller than O , he immediately knows that O is smaller than O . This men-
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tal operation is better thought of as an inference than as a mental simulation
of an action. The relevant inference rule is, if X is smaller than Y, and Y is
smaller than Z, then X is also smaller than Z. Exactly how people draw such
inferences is a matter of controversy. There is widespread belief that the laws
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of logic as explicated by logicians is a poor theory of how people reason, but
agreement stops there. Some researchers have proposed psycho-logics they
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claim fit data from human reasoning, while others have suggested nonlogical
reasoning mechanisms. The theory of insight need not wait for the resolution
of this controversy. People possess cognitive elements of some sort – which I
will call inference rules or reasoning schemas – by which they can spell out what
follows, given certain starting points. To be applied to a problem, these rules
and schemas have to be retrieved from memory. The set of inference rules
activated at each moment in time is a projection of past experience, the mind’s
best guess as to which parts of prior knowledge are needed to reason about the
situation at hand.

Subgoaling
People can analyze a goal into components that can be attacked one at a time.
It is useful to distinguish between two types of subgoals. Some subgoals cor-
respond to nearly independent components of a larger problem. The task of
making tea includes putting tea in the tea strainer and boiling water. The top
goal – make tea – and the two subgoals are related hierarchically via part-
whole relations. In this case, there are no constraints on the order in which the
two subgoals are to be achieved, but there are also subgoals that form a tem-
poral sequence, typically because each is a prerequisite for the following one.
To fly somewhere, you have to get yourself to the airport, clear security, locate
the right gate and board the plane. These actions cannot be performed in any
other sequence; each one sets the stage for the next. We know little about how
people analyze goals into subgoals, but the reality of the subgoaling process is
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