What is common between Einstellung Effect, the movie ‘Patch Adams’, Warren Buffett and the Healing system Ayurveda ?
They all depict and deal with the importance of new and better solutions.
Ramanathan S Manavasi
Einstellung Effects prevents choosing new and better solutions
Why do some people repeatedly fail at love or at some aspect of love relating? Here you find out about a rarely known psychological mechanism that accounts for some of those failures; you learn some clever things you can do to see if this applies to you; and then, if it does, what to do about it.
With some well-informed counseling, they came to understand they were effected by a little-known, seldom recognized, mental malfunction which prevents some people from choosing new and better solutions. With that understanding and some help, they were able to work out and try out new solutions and approaches to their love life situations quite successfully.
That psychological mechanism is named the Einstellung Effect after the scientist who discovered it. Here we are dealing with a relational form of the Einstellung Effect which shows up in a great many areas of human and animal behavior and, therefore, in most branches of psychology and its related fields.
The Basic Way Einstellung Works
A person (or a lab animal) gets used to dealing with a task, situation or problem in a certain way. We will call that WAY 1. Then a better way becomes available and/or apparently evident. We will call that WAY 2. Occasionally, the person or animal sees and explores WAY 2, even tries out WAY 2 or, at least, gives it a good look over. Then even if WAY 2 works better than WAY 1 they go back to WAY 1 and keep doing that. Frequently, the person then rationalizes why they keep choosing WAY 1. Many do not even perceive the existence of WAY 2. or believe it to be better even when its superior attributes have been clearly pointed out. While we do not know exactly what the lab animal is thinking, he behaves exactly the same as the person. It keeps choosing WAY 1. and ignoring WAY 2. even when Way 1. does not work anymore.
In love life situations, the lovers tend to favor and feel safer with established proven solutions, viewpoints and standard ways, while being reluctant and suspicious of untried, experimental and new knowledge-based approaches. In lover’s quarrels or spousal arguments’ both find themselves saying and hearing the same things over and over with the same outcomes and with an increasing sense of futility.
Does the Einstellung effect also occur in Chess?
How come strong Grandmasters are able to miss simple-looking ideas? My theory is that it happened because of the involvement of a hidden criminal here — The Einstellung effect. “Einstellung” in German means setting. In Chess, it means that your mind is fixated on a pattern that has previously worked in a given position. But in positions where a different solution might be required, our brains delude our decision making, and skews our thought-process in the direction of the old pattern, making it impossible to find the required novel solution. Cognitive traps like the Einstellung Effect is the result of the brain’s natural desire to simplify the way it processes information. Our brain is a cognitive miser. It uses shortcuts to save cognitive power. Since simplification saves mental energy, our brain optimises for it so that the saved energy can be used on harder tasks, such as when a wild animal pounces on you, or to take a modern example, when a stranger jumps you in a dark alleyway.
“When you see a good move — wait — and look for a better one!” This does not only happen in Chess. It happens everywhere in our day to day decisions. Some special cases are: experienced doctors diagnosing a disease incorrectly because of previous patterns clouding the facts in the new case, and Lawyers misjudging their case because of the same obscurity.
Human mind is fallible. It has its own fault. But we can overcome this if we learn to look at things with a fresh perspective. I spend 10 days at a meditation centre learning this. They said “Observe reality as it really is, not as you like it to be.” and you could add: “Or, because you neighbor said so.” Observe the facts properly and attentively. Look at them the way they are, before you come to a conclusion. Make wise decisions. If you can not look for a better move, sit on your hands until you find one!
Understanding that there is information you don’t know is the first step to developing complex thinking. Anyone can practice seeing beyond what is there. To do so, however, you must rely more on intention than intuition. To see what is really there, you will first have to see what is not there.
A nice way to avoid Einstellung is to walk away from the problem and return after some time has passed. The goal is to let all of those items in working memory lose their activation so you come back to the problem with a fresh pair of eyes (and a clean working memory!). Avoiding mental set is a little more tricky because prior knowledge is almost always useful. The students should not be encouraged to forget what they know because that would run completely counter to their educational mission! This is probably easier said than done, but I think the advice here is to be open to your prior knowledge, but just don’t be constrained by it. In other words, we should be neither blind nor self-constrained!
What you may not know in your creative problem solving efforts is that you are practicing design fixation, also called reproductive thinking or the Einstellung Effect. You are assuming that if this solution worked in the past for similar problems, it will work for your latest problem — a reasonable assumption. What you may not realize is the bad news. Your intentional or unwitting application of design fixation causes you to miss innovation opportunities and the attendant benefits for you and those you serve. Design fixation closes the door to creative problem solving because we become prisoners of the past. As so nicely stated by economist John Maynard Keynes, “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from the old ones.”
One example of circumventing this effect was the design of a baby incubator for developing countries. There, many babies die from hypothermia due to a lack of consistent heat sources. The conventional logic for solving this problem would be to send normal baby incubators. However, they are both expensive and hard to maintain. Most of them break after a few years and then can’t be fixed due to a lack of local expertise. One company, Design That Matters, was able to look beyond the obvious solution to this problem and created the Neonurture incubator. It was designed using easily available car parts so it could be maintained cheaply.
Your approach to a problem is reflexive
Suppose you have a varied career in finance but it can be very rules bound. You want to learn how to be creative again and still have the endurance to learn new skills. You are at career cross-roads. Your thinking feels “fossilized” (perhaps due to experience). You want to re-discover your curiosity in a new productive way, marry it with your past/current work experience, and make a living at it. This was your Eureka moment. Einstellung!
It can be portrayed as a roadblock. It is characterized as the effect “occur[ing] when the first idea that comes to mind, triggered by familiar features of a problem, prevents a better solution being found. It has been shown to affect both people facing novel problems and experts within their field of expertise.”
Being skilled at something leads to the learned pathway being almost the default and overexercised! You are not growing “stupid” but you have been so used to seeing the same patterns that your approach to a problem is reflexive! You become a Donkey attached to the wheel! The mechanism of the Einstellung effect identified here may be similar to the mechanisms behind negative transfer, confirmation bias, and capture or ‘automated action’ errors. They all feature the same theme — familiar aspects of the problem activate a schema which in turn controls the behavioural response, in this instance, the allocation of attention.
The Movie ‘Patch Adams’ underscores a new and better solution for Connectedness
Let us take a voyage of introspection and remember some beautiful scenes from the wonderful movie “Patch Adams”. Patch faces charges of practicing medicine without a licence and provides this impassioned plea — “Every human being has an impact on another. Why don’t we want that in a patient/doctor relationship? That is why I have listened to your teachings and I believe they are wrong. A doctor’s mission should be just not to prevent death, but also to improve the quality of life. That is why you treat a disease, you win, you lose. You treat a person, I guarantee you, you win, no matter what the outcome.” This world is about communities, groups, teams and all humans coming together. In this context, the key words are relatedness, touch, intimacy, synergy, care, togetherness, healing and so on. This connectedness is something like a garden where you come across the soil of collective good. Ecological sharing and concern for the ‘whole garden’ are easily evident here. The emphasis is on deep human collaboration and not role based cooperation or system level coordination or choice less co-option. True collaboration values confrontation and conflict as much as it does helping and burden sharing.
When it comes to what this world fears, there are many lurking around. Among the biggest fears held in this world are fear of isolation. This is such a potent feeling that many successful movies were made that centers on this dark possibility. If you have seen ‘I am Legend’, you see the utterly alone-on-earth Robert Neville; in ‘Castaway’, you emote with Chuck Noland; in ‘Gravity’ , you yearn for Dr. Ryan Stone’s safe return to planet earth. Lack of reciprocity, disinterest in overtures, and may be betrayal of trust, treating of human beings as ‘collateral’ are all triggers to the threat of disconnect for life and living.
Warren Buffett (The Oracle of Omaha) — The Master Strategist for arriving at better solutions
Buffett has eliminated almost all of the obligatory CEO tasks from his schedule: He never talks to analysts (Buffet estimates that 20% of the typical public CEO’s time is spent talking to Wall Street). He rarely talks to the media. He doesn’t attend industry events. He has lived outside of New York City in Omaha, Nebraska for almost his entire career. He barely attends any internal meetings like typical CEOs. What’s important to see here is that these decisions don’t happen by accident. They require continually resisting immense social pressure.
Buffett’s personal life is also very simple. He lives in a modest home (the same one he has been in for 60 years), and he only spends $100,000 per year personally. As we grow in our careers, in our companies, and in our lives, it’s extremely easy to add complexity. In fact, it’s the norm. As you get more profit, it’s normal to hire more employees. As you earn more money, it’s normal to spend more and more. What’s truly powerful and unique is to keep things simple. That takes effort and skill. And, that is part of Buffett’s genius. It’s odd to say this, but one of the world’s richest people may also be one of its biggest minimalists when you compare the lifestyle he could live to the one he chooses to live.
In the only authorized biography of Buffett, his biographer comments on what she learned from him: “The things you do learn and invest in should be knowledge that is cumulative, so that the knowledge builds on itself. So instead of learning something that might become obsolete tomorrow, like some particular type of software [that no one even uses two years later], choose things that will make you smarter in 10 or 20 years. That lesson is something I use all the time now.”
An insightful look at his approach in Nic Liberman’s book reveals a few things about this master strategist. For him, making money is like collecting money — a hobby. He firmly believes in deferring gratification to counter anxiety and impulsiveness. He often refers to a notion of a circle of competence and how important it is to operate within it and to know its boundaries. His approach of operating counter to the market sentiment — sell when the market is buying and buy when it is selling is unique and superb. The strategists seem to operate simultaneously in three dimensions. One, the time dimension — they are the time travellers who can visit the past, be in the present and scan the future — all at once. Two, in terms of knowledge — they are able to bring in breadth — what else do we need to know to do this well. Three, they are the masters of the context. They are the master minds of what can be done to move something forward.
As investors were scrambling out of positions from the Coronavirus-induced stock market rout, Warren Buffett was doing the opposite. Rather than get into the tactical space and the thick of things the strategists would step back and do what they would do best — make an assessment of the current context and capabilities, use data and intuition to review the goal and the direction and look at the long term impact and consequence of the ‘problem and solution’.
Ayurveda — a Healing System in Action enables new and better solutions
What is the impact of the healer ? They are involved in the lives of others in a compassionate, caring and nurturing way. In their watch, people and systems become wholesome and healthy. In turn, this could bolster their ability to expand and grow. In this regard , a healer is a capability builder as well. The healers combat disease by seeking out things that corrode the system from within and bring them back to wholesome balance. We are reminded here of the beautiful system Ayurveda. It is about healing and not about treating or suppressing symptoms of ill health, like allopathy. The healing system Ayurveda has the impact of a balance restorer. In its cathartic function Ayurveda address toxicity, strife and pain and give space to the entity for dissolving blocks. This enables a move towards enhanced quality of self expression. Ayurveda as a healer in action courageously goes over and faces the pathologies of the world. Ayurveda expert practitioners listen from a deep location of care and concern. They go far beyond the words and palpable expressions of the patients . They are able to touch the subliminal message that do not find reviewable expression. As a healing system Ayurveda practitioners are intuitively aware of where fissures may occur, where the fault lines are before attempting the solution.
Ayurveda is considered by many scholars to be the oldest healing science. In Sanskrit, Ayurveda means “The Science of Life.” Ayurvedic knowledge originated in India more than 5,000 years ago and is often called the “Mother of All Healing.” It stems from the ancient Vedic culture and was taught for many thousands of years in an oral tradition from accomplished masters to their disciples. Some of this knowledge was set to print a few thousand years ago, but much of it is inaccessible. The principles of many of the natural healing systems now familiar in the West have their roots in Ayurveda, including Homeopathy and Polarity Therapy.
Worries over the exotic Coronavirus are roiling the world now in every way imaginable. Those not anxious about life, limb, and loved ones are fretting over their stock portfolios.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ This URL gives updated information daily for statistics throughout the world.
One of the great liabilities of public health is the capacity to lose the human reality of it in a sea of anonymizing statistics. As we use numbers to make our point, we have to point to the people behind the veil of those numbers, those families, and invite us both to direct the full measure of our condolence, our compassion, and the solidarity of our human kinship there. However good we may be at accentuating our superficial differences, we are one, great, global human family- the same kind of animal, with just the same vulnerabilities. If your worries relate to you or those you love getting sick and dying, that they could be far more productively directed than at COVID-19. Ayurveda enables you to get some perspective and grip. Ayurveda identifies three basic types of energy or functional principles that are present in everyone and everything. Since there are no single words in English that convey these concepts, doctors use the original Sanskrit words vata, pitta and kapha. These principles can be related to the basic biology of the body.
The basic difference between Ayurveda and Western allopathic medicine is important to understand. Western allopathic medicine currently tends to focus on symptomatology and disease, and primarily uses drugs and surgery to rid the body of pathogens or diseased tissue. Many lives have been saved by this approach. In fact, surgery is encompassed by Ayurveda. However, drugs, because of their toxicity, often weaken the body. Ayurveda does not focus on disease. Rather, Ayurveda maintains that all life must be supported by energy in balance. When there is minimal stress and the flow of energy within a person is balanced, the body’s natural defense systems will be strong and can more easily defend against disease.
Hope you would appreciate the connection between Einstellung Effect, the movie ‘Patch Adams’, the very wealthy Warren Buffett, and the Ayurveda System of medicine.
Thanks for reading
M.R. Subramanian aka Ramanathan S Manavasi
The author of the book “The Art of Seeing — Essence of Vision and Epiphanies of Perception”