Functional Fixedness

Consider the term “thinking outside the box.” Functional fixedness describes the difficulty we experience when we attempt to be creative in our problem-solving and our outside-of-the-box thinking. This cognitive bias refers to the barriers in problem-solving which occur when we struggle to see alternative uses for common objects beyond their conventional purposes.

But we aren’t born this way. Developmental psychology reveals that young children often show less bias towards functional fixedness. This is because our cognitive flexibility substantially increases from 2 to 4 years old.¹⁶ Looking back on when we were young, many of us remember the ease of being creative and using our imagination to transform objects and their intended uses into something more. What was once a chair or a cardboard box, children quickly turn into fortresses or rocket ships. Imagine someone is cooking dinner and realizes they’re missing a rolling pin to roll out dough. Instead of quickly grabbing a wine bottle or a smooth glass to substitute, they’re fixated on the idea that only a rolling pin will do the job. Despite having objects around them that could work just as well, they overlook these alternatives because they’re stuck on the conventional tool.

Researchers discovered this trend during a “box task” experiment with children of different ages and adults. Participants were given a candle, a matchbook, and a box of tacks and asked to stick the candle to the wall. The five-year-olds smashed the task, quickly working out that they needed to use the tack box as a shelf for the candle. The adults and even the 6- and 7-year-olds were significantly slower because they were fixated on the containment function of the tack box.¹⁴

Functional fixedness in the animal kingdom

Adult humans aren’t the only ones to struggle with functional fixedness; chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys are also victims. A 2024 study found that these great apes also struggle to think beyond the box.⁹ In a series of experiments, chimpanzees were first trained to use a straw to drink juice from a container. Subsequently, they were presented with a problem where a food pellet was placed inside a clear tube that was blocked near both ends. To retrieve the pellet, the chimpanzees needed to select the straw that had previously used from three available tools and use it to push the pellet out of the tube. Except for two bright chimps, most hominoid participants struggled to identify the straw as a suitable tool to dislodge the pellet. The chimpanzees’ prior experience using the straw for drinking interfered with their ability to solve the pellet-removal problem. 

Affordance

Functional fixedness is related to affordances, a concept developed by American psychologist James J. Gibson. Affordance is the relationship between an object's characteristics and a user's ability to recognize how it can be used. In other words, affordances represent the potential actions an object or environment enables for an individual. For example, a chair is designed for sitting, a door handle invites grasping and turning, and a computer mouse allows for pointing and clicking. To identify these possible interactions, we rely on signifiers—visible cues or signals that indicate how an object should be used. Functional fixedness leads us to recognize only one affordance in an object when, in fact, there may be multiple.