学进去

In life, once on a path, we tend to follow it, for better or worse. What’s sad is that even if it’s the latter, we often follow a certain path anyway because we are so used to the way things are that we don’t even recognize that they could be different. Psychologists call this phenomenon functional fixedness.

This classic experiment will give you an idea of how it works — and a sense of whether you may have fallen into the same trap:

People are given a box of tacks (大头钉) and some matches and asked to find a way to attach a candle to a wall so that it burns properly. Typically, the subjects try tacking the candle to the wall or lighting it to fix it with melted wax (石蜡). The tacks are too short, and the candle doesn’t fasten to the wall. So how can you accomplish the task? The successful technique is to use the tack box as a candle holder. You empty it, tack it to the wall, and stand the candle inside it.

To think of that, you have to look beyond the box’s usual role as a container just for tacks and reimagine it serving an entirely new purpose. That is difficult because we all suffer — to one degree or another — from functional fixedness. The inability to think in new ways affects people in every corner of society. The political theorist Hannah Arend coined the phrase frozen thoughts to describe deeply held ideas that we no longer question but should. In Arendt’s eyes, the complacent reliance on such accepted “truths” also made people blind to ideas that didn’t fit their worldview, even when there was ample evidence for them. Frozen thinking has nothing to do with intelligence, she said, “It can be found in highly intelligent people.”

Another context in which frozen thinking can turn truly dangerous is medicine. If you land in the hospital, it’s natural to want to be treated by the most experienced physicians on staff. But according to a 2014 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), you’d be better off being treated by the relative novices.