03+-+Question

What is functional fixedness?
Student Name: Angela Tan Date: January 29, 2015

Let's say that we were having an outdoor birthday party. Everyone is sitting on a stool in front of a table filled with food. When the party ended we decided to clean up, but there were no trash cans in sight despite that we have a garbage bag? What could we do? We could flip over a stool and insert the garbage bag onto the stool's legs to make a DIY trash can.



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Functional fixedness is a type of fixation. A fixation is when a person is unable to view a problem from a new perspective. In functional fixedness, it's a tendency for us to view objects only in their usually function or only having a specific function. Just like the example given above, some people might not have thought of flipping a stool over to make a DIY trash can because we normally view the stool as having a particular function only: a tool to sit on, and a tool to stand on to get on object when the object is unreachable by height. Having the mindset of the stool only having these familiar functions (or maybe like a stereotype), we are not able to think outside of the box to find other functions for the stool.

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Citations: Cherry, Kendra. "What Is Functional Fixedness?" //psychology.about.com.// Web. Feb 04. 2015. <[]>

Horowits, Roni. "Functional Fixation." //start2think,com.// Nov. 2000. Web. Feb 04. 2015. <[]>

__Comment: Jane Jung__
====Angela, your explanations are really thorough and it helps me clearly understand what functional fixedness is. Indeed, functional fixedness is the inability to utilize an object for something other than what it was originally intended for. Functional fixedness is due to the mental set individuals possess, when a person struggles to think in an adaptive way. An example of functional fixedness is when you hear the story "you are reading a book at your house. Suddenly someone breaks in to the house with a knife in his hand. Then you quickly use the weapon on your hand to protect yourself" and struggle to relate the word weapon to the book. You are not being able to relate the two because of your functional fixedness of the word 'weapon' in your mind that makes it hard to adapt book as a weapon.====

Kowalczyk, Devin. "Functional Fixedness in Psychology: Definition, Examples & Quiz."//Education Portal//. 1 Jan. 2015. Web. 5 Feb. 2015. .