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Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, was once of motor racing’s most influential engineers. Between 1962 and 1978 Lotus won seven Formula One constructors championships. He summed up his philosophy as “simplify, then add lightness”. It appears to be an uncommon insight. A paper published in Nature suggests that humans struggle with subtractive(减法的) thinking. When asked to improve something, they tend to suggest adding new things rather than removing what is already there, even when additions lead to subpar(低于标准的) results.

The research was motivated by everyday observation rather than psychological theory, says Gabrielle Adams, the paper’s first author, who cites folk wisdom such as “less is more” and “keep it simple”. Perhaps the need for such reminders was evidence of a blind spot in people’s thinking?

Along with colleagues at the University of Virginia, Dr. Adams conducted a series of observational studies. In one, when participants were asked to alter an essay they had written, 16% cut words while 80% added them. Others gave similar results. Of 827 suggestions received by the new boss of an American university for how the institution could be improved, 581 involved adding new things and just 70 suggested removing something.

Having established that addition does indeed seem to be more popular than subtraction, the next step was to work out why. One possibility was that people were considering subtractive options, but deliberately choosing not to pursue them. Another was that they were not even thinking of them in the first place.

Let’s enter a new set of experiments. One experiment asked participants to redesign a lopsided(不平衡的) Lego structure so that it could support a house-brick. Participants could earn a dollar for fixing the problem, but each piece of Lego they added cut that reward by ten cents. Even then, only 41% worked out that simplifying the structure by removing a single block, rather than strengthening it by adding more, which was the way to maximise the payout. Another example, asking people to make a golf course worse rather than better did not change their preference for additions, which suggested that many were simply not thinking of the possibility, at least at first.

What all this amounts to, says Benjamin Converse, another of the study’s authors, is evidence for a new entry in the list of “cognitive biases” that skew(歪曲) how humans think. Instead of thinking a problem through and coming up with an ideal solution, they tend to use cognitive shortcuts that are fast and mostly “good enough” in their mind.

Such research has inspired an entire field dedicated to working out when such shortcuts lead people astray(迷失). Dr. Adams and her colleagues, meanwhile, are keen to investigate their result thoroughly. One question is whether the preference for addition is inborn or learned.