The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering

authored destiny of a derogated class.
    Research on a related problem in the domain of thinking about artifacts—a problem called “functional fixedness” by developmental psychologists—shows just how detrimental to our personal growth teleo-functional reasoning may actually be. This work on functional fixedness suggests, at least indirectly, that viewing ourselves as having an essential purpose can shape our self-concepts in ways that make us complacent to our less-than-desirable present realities. Direct research on this topic has yet to be done, but if we do indeed reason about ourselves—or at least our purpose in life—much in the same manner as we do for artifacts, such reasoning may well be why our self-concepts are especially vulnerable to what others tell us we are. It may also be why it’s so difficult to reinvent ourselves by seeing our own unexplored potential, instead of complacently telling ourselves that if it’s meant to happen, it will happen.
    Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias, found across human cultures, in which our ability to “think outside the box” when dealing with an artifact is severely hampered by the most obvious and apparent function of that artifact. In other words, our ability to generate fertile, atypical, creative insights into the multitudinous uses of a given object—such as a lampshade being turned into a cowboy hat, or a defunct gravestone into a decorative walkway—becomes increasingly constrained by what we believe the designer of that object intended it to be used for.
    In one revealing experiment on functional fixedness by Tim German and Clark Barrett, for example, participants heard about a pair of friends, Bear and Rabbit, who were out playing but suddenly became separated by a fast-moving river (which the experimenter indicated by sweeping his hand across an area of the table before the participants, with the characters separated by a pair of Styrofoam blocks). It was too dangerous for either to swim across, said the researcher, but nevertheless Bear had a couple of handy objects that could be used to help his friend Rabbit get back to the other side—namely, a cup filled with rice, a spoon, a smaller plastic cup, a popsicle stick, a Ping-Pong ball, and an eraser. There were two groups of participants in this study. Each heard exactly the same story and was confronted with exactly the same task—to help Bear help Rabbit get across—but one group was presented with the spoon inside the rice-filled cup, and the other half saw the spoon lying on the table outside the rice-filled cup. The solution? The distance between the two Styrofoam blocks was precisely the length of the spoon, so the answer was simply to use the spoon to bridge the river. Those who saw the spoon outside the cup solved the challenge significantly faster than those who saw it inside. The spoon-inside-the-cup group was conceptually tethered to this apparent scooping function of the spoon and was forced to first escape cognitively from this purpose-constraining setup. 33
    As with any other psychological trait, there appear to be meaningful individual differences in the constraint imposed by functional fixedness on any given human brain. In other words, there are exceptions to the rule. And sometimes these exceptions make history. In 2001, for example, a Malawian teenager named William Kamkwamba saw a bunch of discarded bicycle tires, rusty old car parts, and blue gum trees as being potential building material for solar-powered windmills, and eventually he brought free electricity to his rural village in Africa. Yet when it comes to the development of our self-concepts, other people’s definitions of us, as inferred by their actions and reactions toward us as children, may cast us in something like the role of the spoon in the cup. Sartre believed that this is what happened to the celebrated criminal and playwright Jean Genet (author of The Maids and Our Lady of the Flowers, among other works).