Thinking

Concepts and images, steps in problem solving and its obstacles, deductive and inductive reasoning, decision-making, creative thinking and its stages, and language and thought.

Key ideas

• Thinking manipulates mental representations, images and concepts; concepts group things that share properties.
• Problem solving moves from identifying and representing the problem to planning, choosing and checking a solution.
• Mental set and functional fixedness block problem solving, as do low motivation and low persistence.
• Deductive reasoning goes from a general rule to a case; inductive reasoning goes from cases to a general rule.
• Convergent thinking seeks one right answer; divergent (lateral) thinking produces many varied ideas.
• The creative process runs through preparation, incubation, illumination and verification; brainstorming separates producing ideas from judging them.
• Whorf held that language shapes thought (linguistic relativity); Piaget held that thought comes first.

Remember

Watch out

• Mixing up fluency and flexibility: fluency counts ideas, flexibility counts different kinds of ideas.
• Swapping deductive and inductive reasoning: deductive starts from the general rule.
• Confusing mental set (repeating a method) with functional fixedness (seeing only an object’s usual use).

Worked example