ABSTRACT
Psychologists have been concerned with associative thinking, concept for mation, problem solving, and creative thinking, all of which are important aspects of thinking. But psychologists have not chosen to go any deeper into the evaluation of the products of thought than John Dewey’s analysis of reflec tive thinking. This is understandable. Until psychologists can establish pre dictable, theoretically-explainable regularities between their variables (set, motivation, aspiration, ego-involvement, flexibility, direction, drive-reduction, etc.) and the successful solution of simple problems, they are reluctant to
investigate the relationships between their variables and the acquisition of the knowledge and mental skills needed for judging solutions to complex problems. Thus they have not felt the need for a careful study of the knowl edge and mental skills involved in making such judgments. Somewhat of an exception to this general pattern is the report of Bruner, Goodnow, and Aus tin (6), which did deal with such knowledge and skills in the rather restricted area in which a subject judges whether an hypothesized selection from a small number of given values of given variables is the one that the experimenter has picked.
