MODULE 7

• Problem solving refers to the mental activity people undertake to reach a goal. Problem solving is an effort to overcome obstacles obstructing the path to an solution.
• The problem-solving cycle, is the initial stage, which describes the situation at the beginning of the problem. In this case, your initial state might be, “I need to reach Jim tonight so that we can begin to work on our social psychology project . . . but I don’t know his last name, his email address, or his phone number.”
• The problem-solving cycle, called the goal state, is reached when you solve the problem. Here, it could be, “I have Jim’s last name and his e-mail address.”
• The problem-solving cycle stage is called the obstacles which describe the restrictions that make it difficult to proceed from the initial state to the goal state (Davidson et al., 1994; Thagard, 2005). The obstacles in this hypothetical problem might include the following: “Jim wasn’t in class today,” “The professor said she was going to be away this afternoon,” and “We need to turn in a draft tomorrow.”
• One of the major obstacles to problem solving, according to the Gestalt psychologists, is fixation which is the people’s tendency to focus on a specific characteristic of the problem that keeps them from arriving at a solution.
• One type of fixation that can work against solving a problem is focusing on familiar uses of an object.
• Restricting the use of an object to its familiar functions is called functional fixedness (Jansson & Smith, 1991). The candle problem, first described by Karl Duncker (1945), illustrates how functional fixedness can hinder problem-solving.
• Functional fixedness is a type of cognitive bias that involves a tendency to see objects as only working in a particular way.

  For example, you might view a thumbtack as something that can only be used to hold paper to a corkboard. But what other uses might the item have?
• Exhaustive search is a brute force approach to solving a problem that involves searching for an element with a special property, usually among combinatorial objects such permutations, combinations, or subsets of a set.
• An anagram is a phrase or word that when its letters are rearranged, another phrase or word is created.

  
  

  For example, the word LISTEN can be arranged differently to form the word SILENT, and remember, one of the anagram rules is that all the letters of the original phrase or word must be used to create the new one!
• A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently. These rule-of-thumb strategies shorten decision-making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about their next course of action.
• Types of problems identified by James Greeno

  • Inducing structure
  • Arrangement
  • Transformation
• Inducing structure problems


  • Involve teasing out relations among numbers, words, symbols, or ideas
  • Examples: solving math problems or making analogies
• Arrangement problems

  • Involve organizing parts like unscrambling letters to find a word or piecing together a puzzle
• Transformation problems


  • Require the solver to carry out or create a sequence of changes to arrive at a solution
  • Example: the classic riddle of a farmer transporting a fox, a chicken, and a sack of corn across a river
• The Hill-Climbing Heuristic

  ➢ can be useful when you do not have enough information about your alternatives—when you can see only the immediate next step.

  ➢ certainly does not guarantee that you’ll end up on the top of the hill.
• Analysis


  Breaking down the whole of a complex problem into manageable elements.
• Synthesis


  Putting together various elements to arrange them into something useful. pair of complementary strategies involves divergent and convergent thinking.
• In divergent thinking, you try to generate a diverse assortment of possible alternative solutions to a problem. Once you have considered a variety of possibilities, however, you must engage in convergent thinking to narrow down the multiple possibilities to converge on a single best answer.
• Expertise


  This is one of the factors that influence problem solving where an individual with expertise demonstrates consistently exceptional performance on representative tasks for a particular area.
• Knowledge base


  One of the factors that influence problem solving where novices and experts differ substantially in their knowledge base, or schemas. For example, Chi (1981) found in her study of physics problem solving that the novices simply lacked important knowledge about the principles of physics. As we discussed in previous chapters, you need the appropriate schemas in order to understand a topic properly. Experts may perform especially well if they have had training in a variety of relevant settings.
• Memory


  A factor that influences problem-solving is where experts differ from novices with respect to their memory for information related to their area of expertise. The memory skills of experts tend to be very specific. For example, expert chess players have much better memory than novices for various chess positions. In other words, experts’ memory is substantially better only if the chess arrangement fits into a particular schema.
• Problem-solving strategies


  Factors that influence problem-solving when experts encounter a novel problem in their area of expertise are more likely than novices to use the means-ends heuristic effectively. That is, they divide a problem into several subproblems, which they solve in a specified order. Experts and novices also differ in the way they use the analogy approach. When solving physics problems, experts are more likely to emphasize the structural similarity between problems. In contrast, novices are more likely to be distracted by surface similarities.
• Speed and accuracy


  As you might expect, experts are much faster than novices, and they solve problems very accurately. Novick and Coté (1992) discovered that experts frequently solved anagrams in less than 2 seconds. These experts typically solved the anagrams so quickly that they must have been considering several alternate solutions at the same time. In contrast, the novices solved the anagrams so slowly that they were probably using serial processing.
• Metacognitive skills


  Experts are better than novices at monitoring their problem solving; you may recall how self-monitoring is a component of metacognition. For example, experts seem to be better at judging the difficulty of a problem, and they are more skilled at allocating their time appropriately when solving problems (Bransford et al., 2000). In addition, they can recover relatively quickly when they realize that they have made an error (Feltovich et al., 2006).
• Problem-solving 


  Sometimes, it is not enough to just cope with the problems – they need to be solved. Most people engage in problem solving every day. It occurs automatically for many of the small decisions that need to be made on a daily basis. For example, when making a decision about whether to get up now or sleep in for an extra 10 minutes, the possible choices and the relative risks and benefits of obeying the alarm clock or sleeping later come automatically to mind.