In our Study of the Day feature series, we highlight a research publication related to a John Templeton Foundation-supported project, connecting the fascinating and unique research we fund to important conversations happening around the world.
Agatha Christie’s great fictional detective, Hercule Poirot, famously admonished a table full of murder suspects that “the truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to the seeker after it.” Poirot meant himself, but Christie’s readers might feel a shudder of recognition—whodunits, mysteries, and riddles are a uniquely satisfying logical and literary form, and have been across many eras and cultures. But how, and why, exactly, do they satisfy? Recently, a trio of French researchers set out to find out more.
In the resulting study, “The Appeal of Insight: Why Riddles and Whodunits Captivate Us,” Marius Mercier, Alexis Garsmeur, and Hugo Mercier began with the hypothesis that the sudden experience of insight gives whodunits like Christie’s novels their special charm.
These proverbial ‘Aha!’ moments occur when a sudden understanding “reorganizes one’s mental representations to reveal a nonobvious interpretation,” they write.
This reorganization occurs either when we figure out the solution ourselves or when it is presented to us;
it spurs strong feelings (like pleasure or satisfaction) as well as metacognitive evaluations as we reframe our prior assumptions about the problem (how quickly it can be solved, or what kind of solutions might be possible).
To try to understand whether insight is indeed the underlying attraction of riddles and whodunits, Mercier et al. devised a series of experiments where they created riddles and whodunits with high or low levels of expected insight. Some riddles could only be solved with a counterintuitive reframing, while other problems could be figured out with standard stepwise thinking. Similarly, classic whodunit narratives where the killer’s revealed identity was obvious only in hindsight were contrasted with stories that involved more methodical crime-solving.
The results confirmed several of the researchers’ hypotheses: people who experienced insight when discovering the answer to a riddle or whodunit were more likely to say they wanted to read and share more of the same in the future. When given the chance to read additional riddles right away, the insight-primed participants followed through, although the same effect didn’t hold for whodunits.
Fascinatingly, participants reported higher feelings of insight when they had to be given the solutions than when they were able to solve the riddles or whodunits themselves.
The authors note that theirs is the first known study to specifically examine the role of a metacognitive feeling—insight—in explaining why certain kinds of stories are perennially popular. Readers of whodunits don’t merely desire what Poirot says—to experience the pure beauty of a truth arrived at; they want what Poirot (or rather, Christie) does—revealing that truth in a way that demands, and delivers, a surprising new perspective.
Still Curious?
- Read “The Appeal of Insight: Why Riddles and Whodunits Captivate Us” in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts
Nate Barksdale writes about the intersection of science, history, philosophy, faith, and popular culture. He was editor of the magazine re:generation quarterly and is a frequent contributor to History.com.
