Exploring the Depths of Thought: Mental set and Motivation

Let's proceed from where we left of yesterday in our blog-isode about mental Sets

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In fairy tales, the hero often has to solve a puzzle or face death, but being a fairy tale hero, they always manage to succeed. In real life, it would be much tougher because solving problems becomes even harder when the stakes are high.

Reason is the relation between mental set and motivation.

The more motivated you are to solve a problem, the stronger the sets with which the problem is approached.

If these sets happen to be appropriate, well, good👍

But if they are inappropriate, increased motivation will be a hindrance, for sets will then be that much harder to break.

Since difficult problems, almost by definition are problems that tend to engender the wrong set, their solution will be impeded as motivation becomes intense.

Evidence for these assertions comes from several experiments which show that flexibility goes down when motivation becomes intense enough.

In one such study, the subjects were posed a practical problem. The problem was to mount two candles on a wall, given only the candles, a box of matches, and some thumbtacks .

The solution is to empty one of the boxes, tack it to the wall, and then place the candles upon it.

The difficulty of this particular problem is caused by functional fixedness.

This is a set to think of objects in terms of their normal function:

a box is to put things in and not on top of.

The tendency to maintain this set (functional fixedness) was increased by motivation.

Subjects who expected no particular reward solved the problem more quickly than subjects who were told that they might win a $ 20 reward.

Question:

So, apart from acquiring some further knowledge and some relevant cognitive chunks, while keeping calm about the $ 20 reward that accompanies success, is there anything one can do to surmount them?

So far, no one has found a problem solver's panacea that can apply to any and all of his difficulties.🤔

But some psychologists have offered a few suggestions:

One useful method of solving problems is to work backwards.

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Let's consider this famous example

Water lilies double in area every 24 hours. On the first day of summer, there is one water lily on a lake. It takes sixty days for the lake to become covered with water lilies.

On what day is the lake half covered?

Here, the problem solver will run into trouble if she tries to work it out by brute force:

On Day 1, there is one lily
On Day 2, there are two
On Day 3, there are four, and so on.

The trick is to shift gears and look at the problem backwards.

If the lake is fully covered on Day 60, it must be half-covered on the day before since lilies double in area every day, which means that the answer is Day 59.

In this example, the working backwards method is guaranteed to work.

But it doesn't work with all problems, and even when it does it is not necessarily the best procedure.

When the solution requires a great deal of specialized information, as in problems in physics, novices(students in a college physics course) are more likely to work backwards than experts (their instructors).

The expert recognizes the point of the problem and can therefore mount a direct attack, while the novice can only feel her way, and so starts backwards from the goal.

The Bus Stops Here for today:

Thank you, friends, for staying with me through these blogisodes. Your thoughts and opinions are always welcome and appreciated. I'd be happy to hear them. We will build on this in tomorrow's blogisode. Until then, stay safe, friends.♥️