Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [194]
In one situation, for instance, the subject was asked to mount three small candles on the door at eye level, ostensibly for “visual experiments.” On the table were some candles, a few tacks, paper clips, pieces of paper, string, pencils, and some other objects, including the crucial ones: three small empty cardboard boxes. After fumbling around, every subject eventually restructured his view of the things at hand and saw that the boxes could be tacked to the door and used as little platforms to mount the candles on.
But in another version of the problem, the three boxes were filled, one with little candles, the second with tacks, and the third with matches. This time, fewer than half of Duncker’s subjects solved the problem. They had seen the boxes being used for a specific purpose, and that made it harder to see them as usable in an unboxlike way.31
Duncker called this common and serious impediment to problem solving “functional fixedness”; when a problem solver sees an object as having a specific function, it is far more difficult for him to see it as serving any other function.
This was a noteworthy discovery. It explains why so often the very people who know most about any subject are the least likely to find a good solution to a new problem in their field. Education creates expertise but also functional fixedness. An expert sees the tools he has at hand in terms of the functions he knows they serve; a neophyte may, while coming up with uninformed and even absurd suggestions, see them more creatively. It is no accident that scientists generally make their most original and important contributions early in life.
Duncker, thought by many to have been the most brilliant of the Gestalt group in the 1930s, might have gone much farther with his investigation of problem solving had he not died tragically early. A political liberal, he fled from Germany in 1935 and went first to England and, in 1938, to the United States to teach at Swarthmore. In 1940, at thirty-seven, deeply depressed by the outbreak of war, he committed suicide.
The studies of problem solving by Köhler, Duncker, and other Gestalt psychologists look relatively simple but their implications were profound. They demonstrated that problem solving in human beings (and to some extent in animals) is not limited to trial and error and to conditioned responses but often involves certain kinds of higher-level thinking that produce new vision, thoughts, and solutions. The studies of problem solving were one of the most important ways in which the Gestaltists restored mind as the central concern of psychology.
Learning
For many centuries the study of how knowledge is acquired had been one of the chief interests of psychologist-philosophers and psychologists. But with the advent of the physiologist-psychologists and Wundt, most of it was stored in the attic of culture with other obsolete mentalist topics.
What little the physiologists and followers of Wundt said about learning was mostly secondhand associationism; they saw it as merely the linking or joining of bits of experience. The behaviorists made learning the central topic of their research—but only the mindless learning of SR conditioning; the higher-level mental processes involved in much human learning were ignored in favor of such calculations as the relationship between the number of reinforced trials and the strength of the established habit.
Among the contributions of the Gestaltists, and perhaps their greatest, was the restoration of meaning and thought to the study of learning. Although the Gestalt movement flourished only briefly in Germany and did not replace behaviorism in the United States, it