Problem Solving Mental Process: An Overview

Improving individuals' and groups' abilities to solve problems and make decisions is recognized as an important issue in education, industry, and government. Recent research has identified a prescriptive model of problem solving, although there is less agreement as to appropriate techniques. Separate research on personality and cognitive styles has identified important individual differences in how people approach and solve problems and make decisions. Human thinking, and in particular, the human ability to solve complex, real-life problems contributes more than any other human ability to the development of human culture and the growth and development of human life on earth. However, the human ability to solve complex problems is still not well understood, partly because it has for a long time been largely ignored by traditional problem-solving research in the field of psychology.