Systemic issues arising from functional fixedness have real-world impacts and are a real pain point for societies, as leaders cannot look past traditional solutions to solve complex problems. Functional fixedness occurs due to strong pre-conceived notions that people develop regarding objects and how they must solve challenges using those objects. Researchers have found that functional fixedness is a bias that develops and strengthens as we age. When studying functional fixedness in children, a study done at the University of Essex found that 5-year-old children showed no initial signs of the bias in early development when problem-solving.
Meanwhile, as early as the age of 7, children tended to treat objects as they were meant to be used, already developing the bias. Functional fixedness has also proven to develop more as individuals gain more experience with problem-solving.
Ironically, the more practice we have with identifying solutions to a problem, the more difficult it is to identify alternative or more creative solutions. Individuals who are aware of functional fixedness can work towards avoiding bias and improving their problem-solving abilities.
By consciously working to think innovatively, and better tackle problems in their professional and personal lives, they can strive towards unique and innovative solutions. As with many cognitive biases, functional fixedness can appear when tackling challenges in many different areas of life.
The first step to overcoming functional fixedness is done by first developing an awareness of the problem and simplifying it. By eliminating the details of the problem, we allow ourselves to think more creatively about the solution. By focusing on identifying the problem, and not judging ideas too early in the problem-solving process, alternative perspectives and possible solutions can be identified.
Researchers have found that when people look for inspiration from distant domains, they tend to generate more creative solutions to their problems, especially in comparison to those who draw inspiration from more closely related fields. Crowdsourcing initiatives by large technology companies provide an excellent example of this fix in play.
Samsung, Unilever, and Lego have used crowdsourcing campaigns to share internal company challenges and call for innovative solutions from those external to their company in different industries. Crowdsourcing initiatives have continued to gain traction due to the success companies have seen in their ability to garner innovative solutions at a low cost, aiding these companies to avoid functional fixedness.
Without these preconceived notions and set standards and processes, crowdsourcing participants are able to avoid the restrictive innovative barriers typically developed in these traditional settings. Functional fixedness was first defined by the German psychologist Karl Duncker in Karl Duncker described functional fixedness as a mental block when using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem.
The famous experiment conducted by Karl Duncker is well-known in psychology for demonstrating functional fixedness. In this experiment, Duncker gave participants a book of matches, a candle and a box of thumbtacks, and asked them to attach the candle to the wall so that when it was lit, it would not drip onto the table below it.
Initially, most of the participants attempted to attach the candle to the wall by directly using the tacks or by trying to glue the candle to the wall by melting it. Because the Duncker gave participants a box with thumbtacks in them, few of the participants thought of using the box as a candle-holder and attaching the box to the wall with the tacks.
Since the experiment participants fixated on the functionality of the box being used to hold the thumbtacks, they were unable to conceptualize the box as a potential solution for holding the candle, thus solving the challenge.
Additionally, in the experiment was later conducted by giving one set of participants an empty box without the thumbtacks while giving the other set of participants the box with thumbtacks inside. Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns? Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
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Tricia has a Literature degree from Sonoma State University and has been a frequent contributor for many years. She is especially passionate about reading and writing, although her other interests include medicine, art, film, history, politics, ethics, and religion. Tricia lives in Northern California and is currently working on her first novel. Tricia Christensen. Please enter the following code:. Login: Forgot password? But functional fixedness can also make you less creative and more fixated on proven solutions rather than thinking about other, possibly more creative or useful solutions.
For example, you may think that you can only use a pencil to write on paper. But a pencil is long and thin, so you might also use it to help straighten and support plants in your garden, so they grow taller without falling over.
But that chunk of code may have other uses that you might never imagine, even when other colleagues are using it that way. In this case, functional fixedness could keep you from growing your expertise and advancing in your career. Functional fixedness can also affect your relationships. When one individual sees another person in only one, specifically defined role, that can make it hard to approach situations that challenge this prescribed role. Functional fixedness can limit creative thinking and make it difficult to solve problems in a relationship.
During most of those years, one spouse worked longer hours, and the other, who arrived home from work earlier, made dinner. Recently, the spouse who worked longer hours was laid off. The first spouse is exhibiting a form of functional fixedness, seeing making dinner as a defining characteristic of the other spouse. They will need to challenge their functional fixedness surrounding dinner before they can begin to think of creative solutions.
What you really need to accomplish is getting a long, sharp, metal object into a piece of wood to hold it together. Sometimes, others who have different backgrounds or experiences come up with different uses for the same objects or different solutions to the same problems.
The classic example is someone with long hair using a pencil or pen as a substitute for a hair tie.
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