Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person’s ability to use objects only in the way they are traditionally used. Discovered by psychologist Karl Duncker, it represents the mental shortcuts that often prevent individuals from seeing potential innovative uses for common items.
Functional fixedness hinders problem-solving because it restricts awareness to an item’s most familiar function. Understanding functional fixedness aids in creatively developing innovative solutions.
Methods to reduce functional fixedness involve:
- Challenging assumptions about the usage of objects
- Increasing awareness of one’s own cognitive biases
- Practicing divergent thinking to broaden potential functions
Examples of Functional Fixedness
This phenomenon, although it can often be a useful heuristic saving us time on simple tasks, can impede more complex problem-solving and creativity by hindering the ability to see alternative uses for familiar items.
Common Examples
Hammer: Traditionally used for driving nails into wood or other materials, a hammer can also serve as an impromptu paperweight or a tool for breaking ice, illustrating how its common use can overshadow potential alternative uses.
Candle-holder: While designed to hold candles, candle-holders can also be utilized as decorative plant pots or holders for art supplies, showing that items often have utility beyond their common use.
Book of Matches: Generally used for lighting fires, a book of matches can double as a makeshift notepad or a tool for leveling tables by placing matchsticks under uneven legs.
The Two-cords Problem
In 1951, Birch and Rabinowitz adopted Norman Maier’s (1930, 1931) two-cord problem, in which respondents were given two cords hanging from the ceiling and two heavy objects in the room. They are instructed to join the cords, but they are so far apart that one cannot readily reach the other.
The idea was to attach one of the heavy things to a cord and use it as a weight, swing the cord like a pendulum, catch the rope as it swung while holding on to the other rope, and then knot them together. The participants are divided into three groups: Group R, which completes a pretask of completing an electrical circuit with a relay, Group S, which completes the circuit with a switch, and Group C, which receives no pretest experience.
Participants in Group R were more likely to use the switch as the weight, whereas those in Group S were more likely to utilize the relay. Both groups did so because their prior experience had taught them to use the objects in a specific way, and functional fixedness prevented them from seeing the objects as being used for a different purpose.
Barometer Question
The barometer question is an example of a poorly conceived examination question that demonstrates functional fixedness and puts the examiner in a moral bind. The classic form of the question, popularized by American test designer professor Alexander Calandra, requested the student to “show how it is possible to determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer?”
The examiner was certain that there was just one correct response. Contrary to the examiner’s expectations, the student provided a succession of radically diverse responses. These responses were also correct, but none of them demonstrated the student’s proficiency in the academic field being tested.
Calandra presented the incident as a real-life, first-person experience that occurred during the Sputnik crisis. Calandra’s essay, “Angels on a Pin”, was published in 1959 in Pride, a magazine of the American College Public Relations Association.
Influence of Age and Experience
In young children, problem-solving skills are in the early stages of development. They tend to view objects in a variety of ways, which can lead to less functional fixedness.
Studies demonstrate that 5-year-old children are more likely to find innovative ways to use an object, as their knowledge base is less rigidly defined compared to adults. An interesting research pointed out that age is a determinant in avoiding functional fixedness, noting that as children grow, there is an increased likelihood of applying objects in traditional manners due to the accumulation of knowledge.
Changes Over Lifespan
As individuals age, their wealth of experience often translates into a double-edged sword when it comes to functional fixedness. On one side, prior knowledge can streamline problem-solving processes, allowing for efficient utilization of common objects in their typical roles.
Conversely, this same knowledge can inhibit creative thinking, making it more challenging to perceive alternative uses for familiar items. The balance between experience-induced proficiency and creativity can shift at various stages throughout the lifespan, suggesting a complex interaction between age-related cognitive development and functional fixedness.
Cultural Experience
Scholars have also conducted investigations to determine whether culture has an impact on this bias. One recent study found preliminary evidence supporting the universality of functional fixedness.
The study’s goal was to see if people from non-industrialized countries, notably those who had little exposure to “high-tech” objects, exhibited functional fixedness. The Shuar, hunter-horticulturalists from Ecuador’s Amazon region, were evaluated and compared to a control group from an industrial civilization.
The Shuar community had only been exposed to a small number of “low-tech” industrialized artifacts, such as machetes, axes, cooking pots, nails, shotguns, and fishhooks. Two tasks were devised for the experiments.
- The box task, in which participants had to build a tower to help a character from a fictional storyline reach another character with a limited set of varied materials
- The spoon task, in which participants were also given a problem to solve based on a fictional story of a rabbit who had to cross a river (materials were used to represent settings) and they were given a spoon.
In the box-task, participants were slower to select the materials than participants in control conditions, but no difference in time to solve the problem was seen. In the spoon task, participants were slower in selection and completion of task.
Individuals from non-industrial (“technologically sparse cultures”) were found to be vulnerable to functional fixedness. They used items without priming faster than when the design function was communicated to them.
This occurred despite the fact that participants had less exposure to industrialized made artifacts and that the few artifacts they currently use were used in a variety of ways regardless of their design.
Methods to Overcome Functional Fixedness
Cognitive flexibility refers to the ability to adjust one’s thinking and adapt to new, unexpected situations. To enhance cognitive flexibility, one can engage in activities that challenge the brain’s existing patterns. This can include puzzles that require considering objects in unconventional ways, or brainstorming sessions that focus on the generation of alternative solutions. Research suggests that pushing beyond traditional uses of an object can reduce functional fixedness, as mentioned in a study on meaning training.
To promote cognitive flexibility:
- Uncommitting from previous ideas: Encourage the consideration of new, unfamiliar methods instead of relying on tried and tested solutions.
- Divergent Thinking: Implement unconventional uses for everyday objects to break away from their typical functions.
Promoting Divergent Thinking
This is a thought process used to break through mental blocks and generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. To foster atypical thinking, individuals can undertake exercises that promote ideation without immediate judgment or restraint.
Techniques such as free writing, mind mapping, or the brainstorming method called “worst possible idea” can help deter the fixation brought on by functional fixedness. Encouraging the pursuit of novelty and diversity in thought opens up the potential for multiple viable solutions to emerge, addressing the functional fixedness issue highlighted in relation to the survival-processing paradigm.
Strategies include:
- Open brainstorming sessions: Allocate time specifically for free-form idea generation, where all suggestions are considered without criticism.
- Encouraging ‘what if’ scenarios: Regularly practicing to think about different scenarios where objects can have alternative functions or uses.
Uncommiting
In a 1996 study, computer scientists Larry Latour and Liesbeth Dusink suggested that functional fixedness can be combated by design decisions from functionally fixed designs that preserve the essence of the design. As an alternative to relying on the fixed solution for a particular design problem, this enables the students who have developed functionally fixed designs to comprehend how to approach resolving general problems of this nature.
Latour performed an experiment researching this by having software engineers analyze a fairly standard bit of code — the quicksort algorithm — and use it to create a partitioning function. Part of the quicksort algorithm involves partitioning a list into subsets so that it can be sorted; the experimenters wanted to use the code from within the algorithm to just do the partitioning.
To accomplish this, they abstracted each block of code in the function, determining its purpose and determining if it is required for the partitioning process. They were able to borrow the code from the quicksort method to develop a workable partition algorithm without having to reinvent the wheel.
Overcoming Prototypes
A thorough investigation of various traditional functional fixedness tests revealed an overarching theme of overcoming prototypes. Those who completed the tasks successfully demonstrated the ability to see beyond the prototype, or the initial intention for the object in use.
Those who were unable to produce a successful finished product were unable to progress beyond the item’s initial use. This appeared to be the case in investigations of functional fixedness categorization as well.
Reorganization into categories of seemingly unrelated items was easier for those that could look beyond intended function. Therefore, there is a need to overcome the prototype in order to avoid functional fixedness.
Peter Carnevale,, in his 1998 paper, suggests analyzing the object and mentally breaking it down into its components. After that is completed, it is essential to explore the possible functions of those parts.
As a result, an individual may become acquainted with new methods to use the objects provided to them at the givens. Individuals are thus thinking imaginatively and overcoming the prototypes that limit their capacity to accomplish the functional fixedness problem successfully.
References:
- Adamson, R.E. (1952). Functional Fixedness as related to problem solving: A repetition of three experiments. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 44, 288-291
- Birch, H.G., & Rabinowitz, H.S. (1951). The negative effect of previous experience on productive thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 41, 121-125
- Calandra, Alexander (1959) Angels on a Pin. American College Public Relations Association.
- Carnevale, Peter J. (1998). Social Values and Social Conflict Creative Problem Solving and Categorization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1300
- Duncker, K. (1945). On problem solving. Psychological Monographs, 58:5
- Dusink, Liesbeth; Latour, Larry. (1996) Controlling functional fixedness: the essence of successful reuse. Know.-Based Syst. 9, 2, 137–143
- German, T.P., & Defeyter, M.A. (2000). Immunity to functional fixedness in young children. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7(4), 707-712
- Kroneisen, M., Kriechbaumer, M., Kamp, SM. et al. (2021) How can I use it? The role of functional fixedness in the survival-processing paradigm. Psychon Bull Rev 28, 324–332
- Mayer, R. E. (1992). Thinking, Problem Solving, Cognition. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company
Last Updated on March 4, 2024