TIL Einstellung effect

This is from Chapter 5 of Think Like a Rocket Scientist. That relic he shares is all too familiar. And it’s true. As a kid, I enjoyed solving puzzles like logic puzzles and that was a pretty good exercise outside of what they teach in school. But imagine how much further we could have gone if we had more critical thinking exercises. Of course I’m thinking in hindsight. Maybe younger me and other kids who get asked to do more school work won’t appreciate this so much. :D

When we’re familiar with a problem, and when we think we have the right answer, we stop seeing alternatives. This tendency is known as the Einstellung effect. In German, einstellung means “set,” and in this context, the term refers to a fixed mental set or attitude. The initial framing of the question — and the initial answer — both stick.

The Einstellung effect is partly a relic of our education system. In schools, we’re taught to answer problems, not to reframe them. The problems are handed to — well, more like forced on — students in the form of problem sets. The phrase problem set makes this approach clear. The problems have been set (einstellung), and the student’s job is to solve them — not change or question them. A typical problem declares “all of its constraints, all of its given information, comprehensively and in advance,” as high-school teacher Dan Meyer explains. The students then take the prepackaged and preapproved problem and plug it into a formula they memorized, which, in turn, spits out the right answer.

This approach is wildly disconnected from reality. In our adult lives, problems often aren’t handed to us fully formed. We have to find, define, and redefine them ourselves. But once we find a problem, our educational conditioning kicks in, launching us into answer mode rather than asking whether there’s a better problem to solve. Although we pay lip service to the importance of finding the right problem, we double down on the same tactics that have failed us in the past.