- Hello, all you big, beautiful brains out there. Today we're going to talk about functional fixedness. 

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Before we get started, take a minute to subscribe to Psy versus Psy. Help out your friendly neighborhood psychologist while I tell you all about functional fixedness. 

Now, when I look at this, I see a candle. Now, if I was an especially creative or resourceful person, I might be able to see it in other ways. Maybe it's a doorstop or just a really weird hat. But to me, it's just a candle. That's functional fixedness, when you can't imagine uses for an object other than what it is purposefully designed for. 

Functional fixedness is kind of a mental hurdle. It restricts you from being able to figure out how to use objects for things other than their intended purpose. And sometimes that can be really bad, when you're faced with a brand-new problem that there might not necessarily be a tool for yet, or if you're in a situation where you might not have the right tool that you need for the job. 

The first truly great experiment to take a look at functional fixedness was by a gestalt psychologist named Karl Duncker. And it was published in 1945 after his death. In the experiment, he gave the participants a limited number of items, a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks. Then they were given a task, figure out a way to mount the candle on the wall, and then light. It the trick is the candle can't drip wax all over the wall and onto the floor. 

Given the limited resources, the task seems almost impossible. Participants came up with a lot of ways to get the candle mounted onto the wall. That's pretty accomplishable with enough thumbtacks. But very few could overcome the problem of the candle dripping everywhere. 

That's because to solve the problem, you have to overcome functional fixedness. If you can think to use the tack box in a different way, to contain the wax, then you can figure out to tack the box to the wall with the lit candle inside. And then no wax will drip anywhere. 

When given the box holding a bunch of tacks, people saw the box as only a container. That's functional fixedness taking over. Interestingly, when people are given that same box and the tacks separately, they were actually able to work out the solution to the problem much faster, overcoming that functional fixedness. 

People seem to vary a lot on how much functional fixedness impacts them. And things could impact it, for instance, the culture that you grew up in and how much practice you have with improvising. Some jobs like engineering design and science require you to think outside the box to be able to get your job done. 

Practice using objects in alternative ways can actually be a really good strategy for overcoming functional fixedness. If you want to know more about how your brain can overcome things in your life, make sure you subscribe to Psy versus Psy so you can get all of our other videos, and you can learn all about the science of psychology. Until next time, keep thinking. And I'll see you all later. Bye. 

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My candle is under attack. 

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