Einstellung Effect: Is a Solution That Works Always the Best?

“It has always been done this way.” “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Orthodox economists who keep recommending the same recipes decade after decade. Inflexible bosses who reject new tools. You’ve heard it at work, at school, in the media, among your friends and family. That negative tendency to repeat previous solutions and not consider other possibilities is much more common than we imagine, and it has a name: the Einstellung effect.

A Mechanized Mind

We all know the concept of “muscle memory.” If a motor task is repeated a significant number of times, a person will manage to execute it with minimal conscious effort, without sacrificing speed or precision. All those videos about “extraordinary workers” on YouTube are powerful examples of muscle memory, a “mechanization” of physical work, if you will. However, the truth is that a mental state can also end up mechanized, especially when it comes to solving problems.

Say you face a problem and find a good solution. Later, another problem with similar characteristics appears, and you apply the same solution again. The cycle keeps repeating (similar problem – same solution), but this carries a flaw: repeating that solution prevents you from visualizing or implementing alternative ideas that could be more appropriate and/or efficient. The accumulation of previous experiences turns into a cognitive bias, a negative effect that isn’t always easy to escape: the Einstellung effect.

The 1942 Water Jar Experiment

One of the most famous experiments on the Einstellung effect dates back to 1942, with Abraham Luchins and his three water jars: jar “A” holds 127 units of water, jar “B” holds 21, and jar “C” holds 3. The objective is to fill and empty the jars in such a way that exactly 100 units can be measured, but there’s a restriction: when filling a jar, it must always be to the brim, no exceptions.

The solution isn’t complicated: take jar “A” filled to the brim and use it to fill jar “B”, leaving 106 units in jar “A”. The second and third steps boil down to using jar “A” to fill jar “C” twice (with a dump in between). Luchins continued his experiment with similar exercises, which participants quickly solved using that three-step mechanic.

However, in one of the exercises Luchins used three jars of 23, 49, and 3 units respectively, aiming to measure 20 units. The vast majority of participants adopted the previous three-step solution (use the 49-unit jar to fill the 23-unit one, then fill the 3-unit jar twice), which does meet the final condition… but in the process they ignored the more direct solution: use the 23-unit jar to fill the 3-unit jar, bypassing the 49-unit jar altogether and saving a step. When Luchins gave the group the warning “don’t be blind,” more than half used the short solution.

What Can We Learn?

What can we take away from all this? That the human brain can be efficient in finding a solution, but the solution itself may not be. That people tend to assimilate a reasonable rule and interpret it as “true” until proven otherwise, or they maintain a specific behavior until it stops working, and even then they don’t hesitate to return to what previously proved “correct” if the occasion calls for it. Have you experienced this before, or do you know someone who might be caught in the effect? Leave a comment!.