Thinking Out of the Box - Does It Make Life Easier ?

What is a Mental Set?

As we navigate our way through interpreting the world, we fall prey to various cognitive barriers every day.

For example, try to connect all nine dots in the picture with four connecting straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper.

The answer lies in going beyond the box, which is something we automatically prohibit ourselves from doing.

Mental set refers to an unconscious tendency to approach a problem using techniques you learned from your past. Functional fixedness is a subtype of mental set and refers to the inability to see an object’s potential uses aside from its prescribed uses.  

Learning is indispensable for survival, and following mental sets may also help us get our tasks done easily and quickly. However, mental rigidity might make us fixated on repetitive behavior involving learning from the past rather than focussing on newer, perhaps, more valuable solutions. 

The Role of Culture.

The environment you live in creates the foreground for a lot of problems you may have to experience. For example, people living near the equator mostly use spices in their food to combat the disease-causing microbes in their humid climate. This doesn't pose a problem in the colder regions of the world, so they may not find a solution.

Similarly, Eastern cultures that favor a collectivistic idea of society may prefer finding solutions to problems that concern the general society. To differentiate between your father’s brother and your mother’s brother, Indian languages have separate words, while English uses ‘uncle’ for both. 

The Extent to which it can Affect Us

Mental sets can make a person so used to doing things in a certain way that, when the approach stops working, it is difficult for them to switch to a more effective way of doing things, which hinders problem-solving and can contribute to the feeling of helplessness.

Shawshank Redemption (1994) provides an exciting example of this. The movie starts with the character Andy Dufresne being sentenced to two lifetimes in prison at Shawshank. Most of his fellow prison mates succumb to the idea of a prison life, which is termed institutionalization. Some are institutionalized to the extent that they see no purpose in life outside the prison walls when released after being imprisoned for almost a lifetime.

On the other hand, Andy smuggles in a rock hammer, which is seen as only a small tool for him to carve chess pieces.  He does indeed do so, but he also uses it to carve a hole in the wall of his cell to escape from Shawshank after almost two decades of imprisonment. Getting rid of his mental and emotional blocks helped him create a novel method to endure and eventually escape the Shawshank prison. It was valuable because it allowed him gain his freedom.

Another everyday example is rote learning, wherein most of us have memorized the answers to probable questions for an upcoming exam in our academic life. However, upon seeing a slight tweak in the questions, we cannot apply the same concepts, which leaves emotional (frustration) and behavioral (skipping the answer) consequences.

How can we control the Negative Impact of Mental Sets?

To reduce mental rigidity, one must foster the habit of creative thinking. It refers to finding unusual and novel solutions to the given problem(s) at hand. Here are a few tips for developing creative thinking:

• Brainstorm ideas with a diverse group of people who can have their own unique perspectives to offer. Their suggestions can be noted without any judgment or criticism.

• Present the situation in new ways considering alternative meanings contexts. This should involve divergent thinking. 

• Develop independent thinking and try to perform problem-solving tasks independently. 

• Think future-oriented, considering the endless solutions that can exist to a current problem 

•  Be aware of your own motivational blocks or even judgments that lead you to dismiss certain ideas.