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Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving - Nature.com
Apr 07, 2021 2 mins, 29 secs
Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, New York 10012, USA?

Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, New York 10012, USA.

If you are like most participants in a study reported by Adams et al.1 in Nature, you would add pillars to better support the roof.

Adams et al.1 asked study participants to stabilize the structure so that it would support the brick above the figurine, and analysed the ways in which participants solved the problem.

For example, Adams and colleagues analysed archival data and observed that, when an incoming university president requested suggestions for changes that would allow the university to better serve its students and community, only 11% of the responses involved removing an existing regulation, practice or programme.

Similarly, when the authors asked study participants to make a 10 × 10 grid of green and white boxes symmetrical, participants often added green boxes to the emptier half of the grid rather than removing them from the fuller half, even when doing the latter would have been more efficient.

demonstrated that the reason their participants offered so few subtractive solutions is not because they didn’t recognize the value of those solutions, but because they failed to consider them.

Indeed, when instructions explicitly mentioned the possibility of subtractive solutions, or when participants had more opportunity to think or practise, the likelihood of offering subtractive solutions increased.

Read the paper: People systematically overlook subtractive changes.

Whereas the authors focused on participants’ failure to even consider subtractive solutions, we propose that the bias towards additive solutions might be further compounded by the fact that subtractive solutions are also less likely to be appreciated.

People might expect to receive less credit for subtractive solutions than for additive ones.

Moreover, people could assume that existing features are there for a reason, and so looking for additions would be more effective.

Finally, sunk-cost bias (a tendency to continue an endeavour once an investment in money, effort or time has been made) and waste aversion could lead people to shy away from removing existing features2, particularly if those features took effort to create in the first place.

These perceived disadvantages of subtractive solutions might encourage people to routinely seek out additive ones.

This is consistent with Adams and colleagues’ suggestion that frequent previous exposure to additive solutions has made them more cognitively accessible, and thus more likely to be considered.

As a result, the study’s participants might be generalizing from past experiences and instinctively assume that they should add features, only revisiting this assumption after further reflection or explicit prompting.

Similarly, members of a university community might implicitly assume that the incoming president wants them to formulate new initiatives, not criticize existing ones.

On a grander scale, the favouring of additive solutions by individual decision-makers might contribute to problematic societal phenomena, such as the increasing expansion of formal organizations4 and the near-universal, but environmentally unsustainable, quest for economic growth5.

New York, NY, United States

New York, NY, United States

New York, NY, United States

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