Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
numbers.” Again, you can see that once we have a schema (in this case a hypothesis), we
continually retrieve that schema from memory rather than other relevant ones, leading us to act
in ways that tend to confirm our beliefs.
Functional fixedness occurs when people’s schemas prevent them from using an object in new
and nontraditional ways. Duncker (1945) [9] gave participants a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and
a book of matches, and asked them to attach the candle to the wall so that it did not drip onto the
table below (Figure 8.19 "Functional Fixedness"). Few of the participants realized that the box
could be tacked to the wall and used as a platform to hold the candle. The problem again is that
our existing memories are powerful, and they bias the way we think about new information.
Because the participants were “fixated” on the box’s normal function of holding thumbtacks,
they could not see its alternative use.
Figure 8.19 Functional Fixedness
In the candle-tack-box problem, functional fixedness may lead us to see the box only as a box and not as a potential
candleholder.