ABSTRACT
Despite the postulated importance of analogising to human cognition, the study of analogical problem solving in the laboratory has found disappointing results. Providing an analogue to a participant prior to asking them to solve a problem gives only a small benefit at best. Recently, studies outside the laboratory have suggested that experts frequently use analogies in real-world situations. It is less clear whether novices can also spontaneously invoke and use analogies to solve realistic problems. In the current investigation, undergraduates were observed solving a large-scale management problem over two weeks. It was found that many analogies were produced (on average 4.6 per one-hour session), and that 77% of these analogies reflected a structural rather than a superficial mapping between a base and a target. It was also determined that 56% of these structural analogies involved non-trivial mappings of higher-order relations. Further, it was found that analogies were drawn to serve two different purposes: problem solving and illustration. In generating illustrative analogies, participants frequently made superficial mappings, but when generating analogies to solve problems, they never made purely superficial mappings.
