ABSTRACT
It was the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle who first made inroads into our understanding of what insight is, and though they had neither experimental methodologies nor the technology to assess whether their philosophizing was right, they got us off to a good start. The psychology of insight began with the largely German Gestalt school, and a number of early tests of insightful thinking are still widely used today. Over time, they have built up a huge database of normative, performance data.
The role of insight in understanding the motivations and triggers of people in communications campaigns – from politics to products and public health education – was initiated by a humble and often impenetrable book called The Art of Thought by British academic Graham Wallas. When its central framework was captured in a pamphlet called A Technique of Producing Ideas, its impact was magnified many times over. In the age of Big Data, it is paradoxically often now more challenging to see the forest from the trees and tease apart data and observations from genuine insights.
