This didn’t strike me as a bias at first.
Though perhaps I’m so deeply affected by it that I resist the category.
Closely related to the law of the instrument, functional fixedness is the cognitive bias describing the inability to consider the use of an object outside its typical function.
Overcoming any cognitive bias is impressive, but overcoming functional fixedness is so impressive that there’s a fictional figure famous for it:
MacGyver’s approach to problem-solving centers on overcoming functional fixedness—seeing objects for what they are rather than what we (usually) use them for.
I think about my father-in-law as someone who—like MacGyver—has a knack for evading functional fixedness.
The first time my in-laws visited our new house a few years ago, we sat out on the backyard deck. The deck had two posts perfect for hanging lights. I think it was our first “house project”—hanging those string lights up.
But there was a problem.
The distance we had to cover required two separate strands of lights, and the connection between them—the two plugs—dangled at a midway point between the posts. Gravity did not like this, and yanked at this weak connection. Sick of the wind aiding gravity and pulling the plugs apart, I taped the plugs together with electrical tape.
My father-in-law took one look at this and asked if I had any zip ties.
Zip ties?
I went to the garage and grabbed the bag of zip ties, bringing them back out to the deck, unclear on where this was headed.
He took two zip ties and looped them around the ends of both cords, zipping them so that they wouldn’t slip off their respective plugs. He then threaded a third zip tie through these loops, pressed the two plugs together, and zipped the third plug tight. The two strands then hung snugly together, immune to wind and gravity, and no need for tape. Years later, the zip tie solution still hangs there.
I had the zip ties in the garage all along, but their use as a tool for something other than pinning holiday lights to the backyard fence never occurred to me.
Taylor Coe 