Thinking

This is the seventh chapter of NCERT's Class 11 Psychology textbook (pages 109–125). It describes the nature of thinking and its building blocks — mental images and concepts; three processes of thinking — problem solving, reasoning and decision-making; the nature, process and enhancement of creative thinking; the relationship between thought and language; and the development and use of language. It has three boxes, five figures (7.2 in two parts), one table, three activities, nine review questions and one project idea; the answers to Activity 7.2 are on page 125. (Beyond NCERT: the chapter does not use the words ‘heuristic’ or ‘bias’; since these are central to GS4, they appear here in clearly marked Beyond-NCERT notes.)

• Builds on What is Psychology? (the cognitive approach), Human Development (Piaget's sensorimotor stage, which Vygotsky's account cites), Learning (Skinner's shaping and reinforcement, which NCERT uses for language; Köhler's insight, a cousin of ‘illumination’) and Human Memory (concepts live in semantic memory). Leads into Chapter 8, Motivation and Emotion (NCERT names lack of motivation as an obstacle to problem solving).
• Pairs with live chapters: Class 12 psychology Variations in Psychological Attributes (intelligence and creativity measured as abilities — this chapter is the process view), and Self and Personality (self-regulation). The constitutional side of mother tongues and languages lies in the polity chapters.
• UPSC: psychology has no GS paper of its own; this chapter's main home is GS4 Ethics — ethical decision-making and its pitfalls, reason and critical thinking, and creativity and innovation in public service (asked in 2021 and 2025) — and the Essay, which set three thinking topics in 2023 alone (decision-making at the intersection of intuition and logic; creativity in the mundane; thinking needing an ‘opposite team’) and ‘Thought finds a world and creates one also’ in 2025. Box 7.3 supports GS1/GS2 points on India's linguistic diversity and mother-tongue education. No Prelims question tests the chapter.

• Thinking = manipulating and analysing information; internal, inferred from behaviour; built on mental images and concepts (mental representations of categories). Box 7.1: analytical (American) vs holistic (East Asian) thinking.
• Problem solving = goal-directed thinking, initial state → goal; seven steps (Table 7.1). Obstacles: mental set (water jars), functional fixedness (a book as a hammer), lack of motivation.
• Reasoning: deductive (general → particular; fails if the assumption is false), inductive (particular → general; most scientific reasoning), analogy (A : B :: C : D).
• Judgment (forming opinions from evidence; may be automatic) and decision-making (choosing among known options by costs and benefits) are interrelated.
• Creative thinking: novel, original, appropriate; Bruner's ‘effective surprise’. Guilford: convergent vs divergent (fluency, flexibility, originality, elaboration). De Bono: lateral vs vertical; six hats. Process: preparation → incubation → illumination → verification; Osborn's brainstorming.
• Thought and language: Whorf (language → thought; linguistic relativity), Piaget (thought → language), Vygotsky (separate, merge at ~2). Language = symbols + rules + communication; babbling ~6 m, one word ~1 yr, two words 18–20 m; Skinner (learning) vs Chomsky (universal grammar); Box 7.3: multilingualism is a way of life in India.

Thinking is the base of all cognitive activities. It goes beyond the given: looking at a painting, you do not just register colours and strokes; you interpret it, relate it to what you know, and create a new meaning that adds to your knowledge. NCERT defines thinking as a higher mental process through which we manipulate and analyse acquired or existing information — by abstracting, reasoning, imagining, problem solving, judging and decision-making. Thinking is mostly organised and goal-directed (from cooking to a maths sum): one plans, recalls steps used before for familiar tasks, and infers new strategies for new ones. It is an internal process inferred from overt behaviour — you cannot see a chess player's thoughts, only infer the strategies he weighed from his next move.

Building blocks. Thinking relies on knowledge we already possess, represented as mental images or words (concepts). An image is a mental representation of a sensory experience; it can be used to think about things, places and events — imagining a cat on a branch with its tail curved, or standing before the Taj Mahal and describing what you ‘see’. A concept is a mental representation of a category: a class of objects, ideas or events that share common properties. Meeting something new, we extract its features and match them to an existing category; if the match fits, we give it that category's name — and also inherit the category's other properties.

Why form concepts? They organise knowledge so that it can be reached quickly and with less effort — like a child who keeps books, geometry box and pencils in fixed places, or a library that shelves and labels books by subject. Categorising makes thinking quick and efficient. (Beyond NCERT: the price of that speed is that category-based inferences can be wrong — the dog may be friendly — which is one root of stereotypes about people; see section 4.)

Problem solving is thinking that is goal-directed. Problems are not only obstacles; any activity aimed at a defined goal — fixing a cycle, planning a summer trip, mending a friendship, making a quick snack for a friend — is a problem. Some are solved quickly from immediate cues; others need time and effort. Every problem has an initial state (the problem) and an end state (the goal), connected by mental operations. NCERT illustrates them with organising a play for Teachers' Day.

Obstacles. NCERT names two major obstacles — mental set and lack of motivation — and adds functional fixedness. Mental set is the tendency to solve problems by following mental operations that worked before. Prior success often helps with a new problem, but it also creates a rigidity that blocks new rules or strategies — as when, after a few sums of one type, you keep applying the same steps until they fail and then find it hard to let go of them. Functional fixedness occurs when people fail to solve a problem because they are fixed on a thing's usual function; if you have hammered a nail with a hardbound book, you have overcome it. Lack of motivation: skill is useless if one gives up at the first failure; persistence is needed.

Reasoning is the process of gathering and analysing information to arrive at conclusions; it is a form of problem solving whose goal is to determine what can be concluded from given information. NCERT's example: a man running desperately along a railway platform. Deductive reasoning begins with a general assumption you know or believe to be true and draws a specific conclusion — reasoning from general to particular. ‘People run on platforms only when late for a train; this man is running; so he is late.’ The common mistake: assuming the base statement without knowing it is true — people also run on platforms for other reasons. Inductive reasoning draws a general conclusion from particular observations: you watch the man enter a compartment and come back with a bag, and conclude he had left it there. Its common mistake is jumping to a conclusion before all the facts are known. NCERT adds that most scientific reasoning is inductive — scientists and lay persons consider instances and seek the general rule that covers them.

Analogy is a third form with four parts — A is to B as C is to D — the relation between the first pair matching the relation between the second: water is to fish as air is to humans; white is to snow as black is to coal. Analogies help in solving problems by bringing out salient attributes of an object or event that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Reasoning allows us to make judgments: we draw conclusions, form opinions and evaluate events and objects on knowledge and available evidence. NCERT's example: a talkative, sociable man who convinces others easily is judged suitable for a salesperson's job — a judgment based on the characteristics of an expert salesperson. Some judgments are automatic, needing no conscious effort, a matter of habit — braking on seeing a red light. Others draw on past knowledge and experience (evaluating a novel) or on personal preferences (judging a painting's beauty). Judgments are therefore not independent of our beliefs and attitudes, and they change with new information — students who judge a new teacher very strict on day one may, after closer interaction, judge her extremely student-friendly.

Decision-making is choosing among alternatives by evaluating the costs and benefits of each — what to wear, what to eat, psychology or economics in Class XI (interest, prospects, books, teachers; advice from seniors and faculty; attending a few classes). It differs from other problem solving because the possible solutions are already known and one has to be selected. A friend chosen for state-level badminton just before the final examinations must evaluate all possible outcomes. People differ in priorities, so their decisions differ. And because real life calls for quick decisions, we cannot always evaluate every situation thoroughly and exhaustively. Judgment and decision-making are interrelated.

Creative thinking produced the first planted seed, the wheel and cave paintings, and today's science, technology and arts. NCERT's Indian examples: botanist A.D. Karve, who won the UK's top energy award for a smokeless chullah that turns dry sugarcane leaves into clean fuel, and Class XI student Ashish Panwar, who won a bronze medal for a five-foot robot at the First International Robotics Olympiad in Glasgow. But creativity is not only for scientists and artists: everyone has the potential. It shows in writing, teaching, cooking, story-telling, conversation, asking questions, games, organising, and helping others resolve conflicts — ‘everyday creativity’, which NCERT distinguishes from the ‘special talent creativity’ of outstanding achievements.

What makes thinking creative? (1) Novelty and originality: ideas or solutions that did not exist before — a new model of scooter is not original unless unique features are added. (2) What Bruner calls ‘effective surprise’: an unusual product startles those who meet it. (3) Appropriateness in context: being different without purpose, non-conformity, aimless fantasy or bizarre ideas are sometimes mistaken for creativity; researchers agree that thinking is creative when it is reality-oriented, appropriate, constructive and socially desirable.

J.P. Guilford, a pioneer of creativity research, proposed two types of thinking. Convergent thinking solves problems with one correct answer — the mind converges on it (3, 6, 9, … → 12). Divergent thinking is open-ended: many answers are possible, drawn from one's experience — uses of cloth; improving a chair for comfort and looks; what would happen if school examinations were abolished. Divergent thinking abilities include fluency (the number of ideas — the more uses of a paper cup, the higher the fluency), flexibility (variety — using the cup as a container and to draw a circle), originality (rare or unusual ideas, seeing new relationships, combining old and new; research shows fluency and flexibility are necessary conditions for originality) and elaboration (working out the details and implications of an idea). It also allows remote associations — linking ‘food production’ with ‘desert’ or ‘weeds’ (extracting protein from desert weeds) where most people think of seeds, fertilisers and irrigation.

NCERT says Edward de Bono used the term lateral thinking for what Guilford called divergent thinking. De Bono contrasts it with vertical thinking, whose operations move in a straight line, back and forth between lower and higher level concepts, while lateral thinking looks for alternative ways of defining and interpreting problems. In his image, vertical (logical) thinking digs the same hole deeper; lateral thinking digs a hole in another place. Lateral thinking helps make mental leaps and opens several ways of thinking.

De Bono's Six Thinking Hats technique stimulates different modes of thinking; one puts on or takes off a hat as the kind of thinking required changes. The six hats are different perspectives on an issue, and the technique works for an individual or a group.

Research makes clear that new ideas involve more than a flash of insight; there are stages before and after. The starting point is a need to bring out something new — not everyone feels it, as one can be content with routine — arising from sensing problems and gaps in information. Preparation: understand and analyse the task, become aware of background facts; curiosity and excitement push thinking in different directions, and divergent abilities help look from new angles. Incubation: while generating alternatives one may feel stuck or even disgusted, and leave the problem for some time; ideas may not come while one is consciously working, but strike while doing something else — going to sleep, waking up, bathing, walking. Illumination: the ‘Aha!’ or ‘I have found it’ experience, with excitement and satisfaction. Verification: the worth and appropriateness of the idea are tested and judged — here convergent thinking selects the idea that works.

Strategies for creative thinking. Research on creative people points to attitudes, dispositions and skills that can be cultivated. (1) Become more aware and sensitive — to feelings, sights, sounds, textures; spot problems, missing information, anomalies, gaps and contradictions that others miss; read widely, seek varied information, ask questions and ponder the mysteries of situations and objects. (2) Generate many ideas to increase the flow of thought, and deliberately look for multiple angles to increase flexibility — rearranging furniture for space, ways of conversing, the costs and benefits of a course, ways of dealing with an angry friend. (3) Use Osborn's brainstorming to increase fluency and flexibility in open-ended situations. (4) Use checklists and questions for a new twist: What other changes? What else? In how many ways? What other uses?

NCERT examines three viewpoints: that language determines thought, that thought determines language, and that thought and language have different origins.

Language as determinant of thought. Hindi and other Indian languages have separate words for mother's brother, father's elder and younger brothers, mother's sister's husband, father's sister's husband and so on; English has one word, ‘uncle’. English has dozens of colour words; some tribal languages have only two to four. Does an Indian child find kinship easier to think about? Benjamin Lee Whorf held that language determines the contents of thought — the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Its strong version (linguistic determinism) holds that what and how people can possibly think is determined by the language and categories they use. NCERT reports that experimental evidence instead suggests the same level and quality of thought is possible in all languages, given the availability of linguistic categories and structures — though some thoughts may be easier in one language than another.

Thought as determinant of language. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget held that thought not only determines language but precedes it. Children form an internal representation of the world through thinking; when a child sees something and later copies it (imitation), thinking occurs without language. Language is just one vehicle of thinking; as actions become internalised, language may widen the range of symbolic thinking but is not necessary for the origins of thought. Words can be taught, but understanding them requires the underlying concepts — so thought is basic.

Different origins. The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued that thought and language develop separately until about two years of age, when they merge. Before then, thought is pre-verbal and experienced in action (Piaget's sensorimotor stage), and utterances are more automatic reflexes — crying when uncomfortable — than thought-based. Around two, the child expresses thought verbally and speech reflects rationality; children can now manipulate thoughts with soundless (inner) speech, and conceptual thinking comes to depend on the quality of inner speech. Thought can still be used without language (when its vehicle is visual or movement-related), and language without thought (exchanging pleasantries: ‘Good morning! How are you?’). Where the two overlap, they produce verbal thought and rational speech.

Meaning and nature. Without language we could neither communicate our ideas and feelings nor know what others think. A child moves from ‘ma..ma..ma’ — a moment of joy for parents — to words, to sentences, to the mother tongue at home, the language of instruction at school, and then other languages. Language is a system of symbols organised by rules that we use to communicate. Symbols stand for something else — ‘home’, ‘school’, ‘food’ mean nothing in themselves until linked to objects and events; we use symbols while thinking. Rules fix the accepted order: ‘I am going to school’, not ‘school am going I’. Communication conveys thoughts, ideas, intentions and feelings; we also communicate with gestures and postures (non-verbal communication), and people with severe hearing and speech difficulties use sign language, which is also a language.

Development. Psychologists have tried to teach sign language and symbols to chimpanzees, dolphins and parrots, but human language is more complex, creative and spontaneous. Children differ greatly in the rate of language development, yet worldwide they follow a predictable pattern. The first sound is crying — undifferentiated at first, then varying in pitch and intensity for hunger, pain or sleepiness — which gives way to cooing (‘aaa’, ‘uuu’), usually expressing happiness. At about six months comes babbling: prolonged repetition of consonants and vowels (da—, ba—). By about nine months babbling becomes repetitive strings — echolalia (‘dadadadada’); early babbling is random, later babbling imitates adult voices. Children understand a few words by six months. Around the first birthday comes the one-word stage, the first word usually one syllable (ma, da); single words that stand for whole sentences are holophrases. At 18 to 20 months the two-word stage begins — telegraphic speech, mostly nouns and verbs, like a telegram (‘got admission, send money’). Beyond two and a half years, development focuses on the rules of the language heard.

How is language acquired? As elsewhere in psychology the question is nature or nurture; most psychologists accept that both matter. The behaviourist B.F. Skinner held that we learn language as animals learn to press bars — by association (the sight of a bottle with the word ‘bottle’), imitation (adults saying ‘bottle’) and reinforcement (smiles and hugs when the child says it right); children produce sounds suited to their parents' language and are reinforced, and shaping leads by successive approximation to adult speech; regional accents show different patterns reinforced in different places. The linguist Noam Chomsky proposed that language development is innate: the speed at which children acquire words and grammar without teaching cannot be explained by learning alone; children produce sentences they have never heard, so cannot be imitating; there seems to be a critical period for learning language; children everywhere pass through the same stages. Language ‘just happens to the child’, like physical maturation, because children are born with a universal grammar. NCERT concludes that Skinner's emphasis on learning explains why infants acquire the language they hear and add new words, and Chomsky's built-in readiness explains why they acquire grammar so readily without direct teaching.

Language use. Knowing vocabulary and syntax does not ensure proper use. We use language with pragmatic intentions — requesting, asking, thanking, demanding — and to serve these social goals speech must be pragmatically correct (contextually appropriate) as well as grammatical and meaningful. Children often find it hard to choose polite forms — a request comes out as a command — and to take turns in speaking and listening.

The chapter has three activities and one project idea, plus the introduction's question about why we talk while we think. Short outlines follow.

The nine review questions at the end of the chapter (page 124). Try each first, then open the outline.

Numbers

One-liners

• Thinking manipulates information and goes beyond the given; it is inferred from behaviour.
• Images represent sensory experience; concepts represent categories.
• Concepts make thinking fast — and make category-based mistakes possible.
• Problem solving links an initial state to a goal by mental operations.
• A mental set speeds the familiar and blinds us to the simple.
• Deduction goes from general to particular; induction from particular to general.
• Validity is about form; truth is about premises.
• In decision-making the options are known; the task is to choose.
• Judgments can be automatic, and change with new information.
• Creative = novel, original and appropriate.
• Divergent thinking generates; convergent thinking selects.
• Lateral thinking digs a new hole; vertical thinking digs the same hole deeper.
• Incubation precedes illumination; verification follows it.
• Brainstorming separates producing ideas from judging them.
• Whorf: language shapes thought; Piaget: thought comes first; Vygotsky: separate roots, merged at two.
• Skinner explains which language and words; Chomsky explains the speed of grammar.

Traps to avoid

• NCERT's two MAJOR obstacles are mental set and lack of motivation; functional fixedness is added alongside.
• Mental set can help as well as hinder problem solving.
• Activity 7.2's STGNIH is one letter short of its answer INSIGHT.
• Table 7.1's glosses for steps 4 and 5 appear swapped in print; learn the step names.
• Deductive starts from an assumption (general); inductive from observations (particular).
• The mouse in Fig. 7.3 has true premises and an invalid form — not a false premise.
• NCERT says most scientific reasoning is inductive; science also tests hypotheses deductively.
• Decision-making chooses among KNOWN alternatives.
• Fluency and flexibility are necessary conditions for originality — not the reverse.
• ‘Effective surprise’ is Bruner's phrase; convergent/divergent is Guilford's.
• Black hat = judgment, caution, logic; blue hat = the process, not ideas.
• The ‘Aha!’ is illumination, not incubation.
• Box 7.1's study compared American and Japanese students; ‘Asians’ is NCERT's generalisation.
• NCERT's ‘Vyogotsky’ is Vygotsky; its ‘Chapter 6 on Learning’ is Chapter 5.
• Linguistic determinism is the STRONG form of linguistic relativity.
• Universal grammar and the critical period are Chomsky's (in NCERT); shaping and reinforcement are Skinner's.
• Heuristics, biases, Kahneman and Simon are not in the NCERT chapter.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• No Prelims question in the archive tests this chapter. The nearest is Prelims 2001 on the Article providing instruction in the mother tongue at the primary stage — a polity fact this chapter's Box 7.3 does not teach.
• If psychology appears, expect pairs: deductive/inductive, convergent/divergent (Guilford), lateral/vertical (de Bono), the six hat colours, the four creative stages in order, Whorf/Piaget/Vygotsky, Skinner/Chomsky, holophrase/telegraphic speech.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS4 — creativity in public service: ‘Besides domain knowledge, a public official needs innovativeness and creativity of a high order as well, while resolving ethical dilemmas’ (2021). Frame: dilemma as a false binary → divergent thinking for third options (fluency, flexibility, originality) → convergent verification against law, fairness and feasibility (NCERT's ‘appropriate, socially desirable’) → obstacles in offices (mental set, functional fixedness) → an Indian example.
• GS4 — reason and critical thinking: ‘For any kind of social re-engineering by successfully implementing welfare schemes, a civil servant must use reason and critical thinking in an ethical framework’ (2025). Use deduction (apply rules and entitlements, but test the assumptions), induction (field evidence, pilots, grievance data), judgments revised with new information, and Beyond-NCERT biases (confirmation, availability, anchoring) as reasons for evidence-based checks.
• Essay: ‘Visionary decision-making happens at the intersection of intuition and logic’ (2023) — automatic judgment vs deliberate cost–benefit choice; the attributed debate (Simon, Kahneman–Tversky, Gigerenzer). ‘Inspiration for creativity springs from the effort to look for the magical in the mundane’ (2023) — everyday creativity, sensitivity to gaps and anomalies, incubation during ordinary activity. ‘Thinking is like a game, it does not begin unless there is an opposite team’ (2023; weakest link) — problem as the initial state, the black hat and devil's advocate, confirmation bias and groupthink when no one opposes. ‘Thought finds a world and creates one also’ (2025) — concepts organise (find) the world; creative thinking and language (Whorf) create one.
• Not linked, and why: GS4 2023 ‘moral intuition vs moral reasoning’ is moral philosophy (and sits on a political-theory chapter); this chapter gives only the general reasoning vocabulary. GS4 2021 and 2024 on digital technology / AI as inputs for rational decision-making test technology ethics, not the psychology of deciding. GS4 2015 on conflict of interest in decision-making is about integrity. Gandhi quotations on thought and anger (GS4 2018, 2019) concern character and emotion (Chapter 8 and Class 12). GS1 questions on linguistic states are history and polity.
• Answer frame: name the thinking process (problem solving, reasoning, judgment, decision, creativity) → the model (attributed: Guilford, de Bono, Wallas, Kahneman–Tversky, Simon) → an Indian administrative example → its typical failure (set, fixedness, bias) → a practical safeguard (redefine, consult dissent, verify, record reasons).

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

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