CONCEPT
Trisociation
A 2025 California Management Review extension of Koestler's bisociation to three-concept combination via AI—a well-intentioned but structurally flawed formalization that illustrates the combinatorial fallacy.
Trisociation is the term introduced by researchers in a January 2025 California Management Review article to describe the generation of novel ideas by combining three unrelated concepts using large language models. The researchers cited Koestler's bisociation as theoretical foundation and argued that AI had made it possible to extend the mechanism: where Koestler described the collision of two matrices, the machine could facilitate collision of three. The paper is instructive not for what it achieves but for what it reveals—a textbook case of the combinatorial fallacy that operationalizes Koestler's framework by stripping away exactly the features that make bisociation different from combination.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The researchers assume bisociation is a combinatorial operation—that the creative act consists in bringing concepts together, and that more concepts brought together means more creativity. Three is better than two. The machine, which can hold and combine concepts at scale, is therefore a creativity multiplier. The logic is clean, the experimental design competent, and the conclusion wrong in exactly the way Koestler's