Order of European Inventors and Innovators
by Ileana Vlad, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist
I have written here about the fear of ridicule — the fear of what others will say. But there is also a resistance that needs no others in order to work: the mind itself prefers what it already knows. And unlike the first, this one does not feel like fear at all. It feels like good judgement.
An experiment with water jars
In the 1940s, Abraham and Edith Luchins gave participants a series of simple problems: given three jars of different capacities, measure out a particular quantity of water. The first problems could all be solved by the same, rather laborious formula. Then came problems that could be solved far more briefly — but also with the old formula.
Almost everyone carried on with the old formula. The control group, which had not practised it, went straight to the simple solution. And when participants were told, before the problems, only this — “don’t be blind” — more than half switched to the short solution.
The effect has a name: Einstellung. It is not stupidity and it is not laziness. It is what happens to a mind that has found a solution which works.
What an expert’s eyes are actually doing
Merim Bilalić, Peter McLeod and Fernand Gobet took the experiment to chess players. They gave them positions with two solutions: a familiar one, known to any good player, and a better but less usual one. When the familiar solution was present on the board, the performance of masters dropped to the level of players three standard deviations weaker. When the same position was modified so that the familiar solution no longer existed, they found the good one without difficulty.
The part I find most important is what the eye-tracking showed: the players went on looking at the squares of the familiar solution — while sincerely reporting that they were searching for alternatives.
They were not lying. They simply had no access to what their own attention was doing.
Why the mind does this
Because in most situations it is the right strategy. A solution that has worked five times has a good chance of working a sixth, and searching for another costs time, effort and the risk of being wrong. The mind is not conservative out of stupidity, but out of economy.
The trouble begins when that economy is applied where it should not be. And the place where it should not be is precisely technical creation — the one field in which the solution that has worked five times is, by definition, the solution everybody already has.
The painful part: experience strengthens the effect
The better you know a field, the more ready-made patterns you carry and the faster the first one fires. The beginner has nothing to fire; that is why they sometimes ask the question the expert no longer asks.
This is not an argument against expertise — without it you never get past verification. It is an argument for one particular habit: the expert needs, more than the beginner does, a procedure for getting out of the first solution.
Uncertainty makes everything worse
A study by Jennifer Mueller, Shimul Melwani and Jack Goncalo (2012) showed something unpleasant: people explicitly state that they value creativity — but their implicit attitudes reverse when they are placed in a situation of uncertainty. Worse, that bias reduced their ability to recognise a creative idea when they saw one.
This explains something often seen in committees and boards: the new idea is not rejected because it was weighed and found wanting. It is found wanting because it is new, at a moment when the person judging cannot bear uncertainty. And moments of decision are, by their nature, moments of uncertainty.
What can be done
Name the first solution and set it aside, in writing. “The first one that came to me is X. I am leaving it here.” A pattern that has been recognised and written down loses part of its pull.
Look for the second solution before evaluating the first. The order matters: if you evaluate first, the second one never appears.
The warning works — but given beforehand. “Don’t be blind” moved more than half of the participants. The same sentence, said after the solution has been chosen, moves nobody.
Bring in someone who does not know the field. Not to solve, but to ask. The naive question is the only instrument that reaches beneath the pattern.
When judging someone else’s idea, ask yourself what is making you uncertain at that moment. If the answer has nothing to do with the idea, then the idea is not the problem.
Two barriers, one remedy
The fear of ridicule stops you from saying the idea. The conservatism of the mind stops you from having it. The first comes from other people, the second from the economy of your own thinking. Neither is torn down by willpower — both are worn thin by practice, and both give way to the same simple thing: the habit of looking for the second solution before settling on the first.