"...deep down, I have to admit… I sometimes don’t know if what I’m doing is right."

My brother linked me an article about design recently and the quote I have written in this post's title is what stood out to me for reasons I want to explore. Please note that this is more of a "free thought" post and it's not like my other entries where I look up research and use quotes from reliable sources.

From the very beginning, we have guidance and clear goals. Before we go to grade school, kindergarten, or whichever starting teaching location you would like to use, most of us have clear rules and direction from our parents. Life is simple and we know what to do and what to work towards. As we enter school, this trend continues. Our teachers essentially take the role of parents while we are outside the home. We have clear goals such as achieving good grades and we understand that the way to achieve those goals is to follow directions, study, and keep distractions to a minimum. This trend of having straightforward guidance holds true for over 15 years and into college. One might argue that you have an increased level of freedom and creativity in college but the underlying principle essentially remains the same. You still study and follow directions and most times simply parrot what the professor said during the lectures. This strategy might not win you creativity points but it gets the job done. It allows you to get the grades and get your degree. My experience is only until the Master's degree level so attaining a PHD might be a different story. However, the underlying premise still stands; the tactic that you learned all the way back in kindergarten essentially works without any major problems and gives your life direction, stability, and consistency. For over 20 years, you are essentially given a false sense of comfort and unless you have a truly caring mentor of some sort, you have no idea that once you leave the academic setting, the real world is going to punch you in the face; repeatedly.

And now we come back to the quote in the title. As soon as the comfort, consistency, clarity, and direction of the academic world is pulled out from under us, we enter a world where the training we had been receiving so far (both formally and informally) starts making very little sense and it's hard to tell when we're doing the "right" thing and what the right thing even is. Working hard and following directions no longer seem to do much in a professional setting. If anything, it nearly guarantees that you will be off the radar of anyone influential or important and you will blend into the background. Quality work is rarely acknowledged or even recognized because more often than not, the people who look at the "big picture" are concerned primarily with the quantity of the work accomplished and what the "numbers" show. The quality of the work is irrelevant until it causes complaints or fails an audit. Until then, it's smooth sailing as far as they're concerned.

During all this, you quickly realize that the idea of "grades" is no longer relevant. This system that you were trained to succeed under makes no sense in any real-world situation. So what do you do? Well, your next realization hopefully involves the fact that no one has actually taught you the relevant skills for attaining success outside of a tame academic setting. There were no classes offered on topics such as networking or managing professional relationships and surviving office politics. There were no classes on understanding human irrationality and how real and imperfect humans behave and what are the best ways to work with them and get them to cooperate. You didn't take the time to learn how to market yourself in an attractive and easily palatable way.  You don't quite understand why most people seem to be more concerned with being right (even if they're wrong) than actually getting to the underlying truth of the matter. You don't understand why genuine humility and the ability to admit mistakes is so desperately rare.  The list of the skills that you should have learned and the realizations you should have made is extensive and I can go on. The overarching point is that you enter the professional world mostly unprepared and somewhat confused.

On top of all this, you were most likely so busy with following directions and trying to chase good grades that you essentially forgot to take some time to think about uncomfortable and difficult questions dealing with life's meaning and what you would like to devote yourself to. No one told you that this would be a very important issue for you to think about as you got older and you need a way to manage such thoughts and accept them as part of who you are as opposed to viewing them as a foreign and uncomfortable presence that is infested with uncertainty.

I have been using the words "you" and "we" throughout this post. But let's face it, I am primarily talking about myself. After I shared the title quote with my brother, he said something that frustrated me. Upon thinking about it more, I guess it's oddly comforting:

Very few people ever know what they're doing or even why they're doing it

I will just leave it at that.

Seeing the world with fresh eyes

The Einstellung (set) Effect is the topic of today's entry. This phenomena is described by the researchers Merim Bilalić, Peter McLeod, and Fernand Gobet. Their original article that I will be referencing in this post can be found here:

Why Good Thoughts Block Better Ones: The Mechanism of the Pernicious Einstellung (set) Effect

"The Einstellung (set) effect occurs 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. We show that it works by influencing mechanisms that determine what information is attended to."

What this essentially means is that our prior knowledge and expertise in a specific area can actually work against us when facing new problems, especially in regards to new situations that have similarities to ones we have dealt with in the past. Our previous knowledge can essentially blind us to the superior solution because we are stuck thinking about the problem in a very limited way that had worked in the past in a very similar but still different situation.

The researchers experimented with Chess players to show the Einstellung (set) Effect in action. Expert Chess players were presented with the task of achieving a checkmate in the shortest amount of turns possible. The quicker and lesser known solution was 3 turns and the more well-known solution was 5 turns. By and large, even the most experienced players were stuck on the 5-turn solution because that was the one they had the most familiarity with. As a result, all their attention was on the longer solution and it effectively stopped them from considering the superior solution. The researchers took the experiment a step further and asked the players if they were even considering the second superior option while working on the task. The majority claimed that they were. However, by using eye-tracking software during the experiment, they were able to analyze the truth behind these statements. The eye-tracking data showed that the Chess players were not in fact actively attending to the other solution. Their eye movements clearly showed they were primarily paying attention to parts of the Chess board relevant to the longer and more well-known solution. According to the authors:

"We show that the origin of the effect was that players continued to look at the squares related to the first idea they had, even though they reported that they were looking for alternative solutions. The eye movement data suggest a mechanism by which one pattern of thought can prevent others coming to mind."

The players who failed to find the shorter solution were then presented with a Chess problem where the only solution was the 3-turn one and the longer solution was no longer possible. In this scenario, they had no problems finding the new solution, which proved they had the ability to see the shorter solution all along. However, there is an additional detail here. These Chess players who had initially failed the 2-solution problem took longer to solve the new 1-solution problem than players who had never been exposed to the initial 2-solution problem. In essence, their "blindness" from the initial experiment was still negatively affecting them in a new scenario.

The entire study is yet another illustration of how everyone, both experts and novices, are prone to confirmation bias. Once we assess a situation and believe we have found the "correct" path of action to take, alternate solutions are much less likely to be considered. We are fixated on the single solution that we believe is the true one and as a result we fail to account for evidence that can prove us wrong or change our views and align them more with reality. Instead, we primarily welcome evidence that confirms our views and are selective in what information we process.

The authors go on to state that such shortcuts in thinking are not necessarily counterproductive. In fact, such thinking is efficient and  makes sense in most situations because it can allow us to save energy and time when trying to solve a problem:

"Cognitive mechanisms that prevent us spending time looking for an alternative solution to a problem when we already have an adequate one are obviously useful.. in complex real world situations people usually prefer to look for solutions that are good enough rather than spending their energy looking for an elusive best that may be out of reach."

However, such thinking obviously has negative consequences as well because it can lead people to

"repeatedly try to solve the problem with the same method even though it has proved unsuccessful  Constant failure to find a solution is not enough to change the schema they use."

Such discounting of relevant evidence can also lead to scientists in numerous fields to get fixated on the more familiar solution and fail to assess a problem objectively, which is an important goal of scientific research and thought. Perhaps the most troubling aspect is that even experts with years of experience do not realize they can be prone to such biases.

The takeaway lesson from all this is that no matter how experienced or knowledgeable you think you are, always be open to assessing a problem with fresh eyes and have the humility to admit that you can make mistakes and be prone to biases that cause you to discount important evidence that has the potential to prove you wrong. Making mistakes and changing your views as a result of new information should not be viewed as a negative characteristic. It shows that you are constantly willing to learn and are open to new ideas and solutions, no matter how much of a seasoned veteran you are.