My family loves the game Code Names. But the first few times we played it, I was stumped. I could not for the life of me come up with one word that connected bobsled, bonnet, Russia and angel. Can you blame me?! Turns out, there’s a very rational explanation (phew).
Imagine you’re given a candle, a box of thumbtacks and a box of matches. Your challenge? To fix the lit candle to the wall so that it doesn’t drip wax onto the table below.
What did you come up with?
The Candle Problem is a classic test of creative problem solving developed in 1945 by psychologist Karl Duncker. The test challenges functional fixedness, a cognitive bias that makes it difficult for us to use familiar objects in unfamiliar ways. The problem with functional fixedness is that it hinders our ability to be creative when solving new challenges. More specifically, Duncker describes it as “…a mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem”.
Many psychologists have questioned whether functional fixedness is a universal concept or whether it’s affected by age and culture.
It turns out that we’re much less affected by the bias when we’re young. Remember all those forts you made out of pillows and blankets? Or how you stacked those piles of cardboard boxes into a castle without a second thought? Well, five year old children show no signs of the cognitive bias when problem-solving. Unfortunately–as I’m sure you’ve noticed–our functional fixedness strengthens as we age, affecting children as young as seven.
Functional fixedness has also been observed cross-culturally. Psychologists tested if individuals from non-industrialised societies who had been exposed to very few “high-tech” objects demonstrate different levels of functional fixedness in comparison to their industrialised counterparts. The experiment was conducted in the Shuar community based in the Amazon region of Ecuador, whose daily objects lack highly specialised functions; they are therefore forced to creatively utilise the objects in their surroundings for multiple purposes. Despite this, the results of the study suggested that individuals from technologically sparse cultures were also susceptible to functional fixedness when dealing with objects such as a box and spoon.
The prevalence of functional fixedness across society means that it has a significant effect on how we work. Technologists, engineers, scientists, design thinkers all have their own expertise, but they also have their own way of applying their expertise, as well as the tools and methodologies they use on a daily basis. With experience, unfortunately, comes weaker creativity.
As a result, one of the most powerful antidotes to functional fixedness is to introduce interdisciplinary problem solving, seeking inspiration from different domains to generate more creative solutions to problems. With more interdisciplinary folks in the room, you’re more likely to offset the functional fixedness that accompanies the expertise of each individual.
And, in case you’re still scratching your head, here’s a clue: you have to use the box of tacks as a candleholder…
