Functional Fixedness - The Candle Problem | Hacker News Reader

Functional Fixedness - The Candle Problem

en.wikipedia.org

10 pointsehsanul5 comments

The horrendously misleading part of this is that the experiment says to attach the candle to the wall. The lexical semantics of "attach" do not permit that you "attach the candle to the wall" by tacking a box to the wall and placing the candle in it. The verb attach simply doesn't mean that -- this demonstrates nothing.

Further, numerous studies have been done regarding lexical and conceptual semantics and the role of direct objects in semantic interpretation, and they demonstrate quite simply that whatever the direct object is of a sentence, this tends to be an affected item. Supporting a candle with a box is not affecting the candle in the ways relevant to human cognition, while tacking it to the wall, or melting it, is. So the phrasing again was misleading.

While I'm sure functional fixedness is a real phenomena, I would bet that it isn't even remotely as simple as this particular experiment suggested, and that a wide variety of linguistic techniques can affect how well people are at this. In fact, on the main page for the Candle Problem it's point out that a) using "box and tacks" instead of "box of tacks" in the instructions improves performance, while b) offering a monetary incentive decreases performance. So before you get all hyped up about how you want to think outside the box because my gosh imagine what awesomeness functional fixedness is preventing you from seeing, stop to consider that noone's got any clue what's really going on inside the mind, and you're probably just as likely to screw yourself by trying to manipulate yourself this way as you are to benefit yourself.

I not sure your argument about semantics applies. First of all, we do not know if the word "attach" was used in the original experiment. In fact, the main candle problem page says this:

The test presents the participant with the following task: how to fix a lighted candle on a wall (a cork board) in a way so the candle wax won't drip onto the table below.

The semantics in that phrasing of the problem seem alright.

Now, consider the experiment by Adamson. In that case, presenting the materials in a certain manner changed how they were made use of. This is clearly independant of any semantics. You may want to watch the video nreece linked to.

The Candle Problem was used as an insightful example by Daniel Pink in his TED talk on the surprising science of motivation - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y

Yeah, that's how I originally found out about it, and would have linked to that talk. Except, TED talks often don't seem to get many points here, which seems strange to me given the community.

Tacking a box onto a wall is a horrible solution. You'd need two or three long tacks, a light candle, and I'd probably put the tacks in at an angle, too. And then you'd need to solve the problem of the falling candle.

I'm not sure what would be a good solution, since the candle would need to be placed at least 5cm away from the wall, and there just aren't materials for that.

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