The Einstellung effect can block us from finding new solutions

By Charles Valentine · November 6, 2026

The Einstellung effect is the tendency to keep using a familiar solution even when a simpler or better one is available. Psychologists also call it a mental set, and it is closely related to functional fixedness. For leaders, it explains why organizations so often repeat the fix that worked last time.

In 1942, the psychologist Abraham Luchins set three water jars in front of people and asked them for an exact amount of water. Not more. Not less. The first problems all gave way to the same steps. Fill the middle jar. Pour off the first jar once. Pour off the third jar twice. People learned the steps, and soon the steps lived in them, and nobody had to think very hard at all.

Then Luchins changed the problem and said nothing. The next puzzles could still be solved the long way. They could also be solved in one easy step. Most of the people who had practiced kept walking the long road, step after familiar step, and never saw the short one lying right beside it. People who had not practiced found it almost every time. And when Luchins handed over a puzzle the old steps could not solve, many in the practiced group simply stopped. The method they trusted had nowhere else to take them.

Psychologists have a name for this. They call it the Einstellung effect, from the German for “setting” or “attitude.” It is what happens when the way that worked before stands in the doorway and keeps the better way out.

Experts are not immune

You might expect experience to protect against this. It does the opposite.

In 2008, the researchers Merim Bilalić, Peter McLeod, and Fernand Gobet tested strong chess players. They showed them positions with a well-known winning pattern. A shorter, better win was also on the board. Many experts found the familiar win and stopped there. Asked what they were doing, they said they were still looking for something better. Eye tracking told a different story. Their eyes kept going back to the squares that belonged to the solution they already had. They believed they were searching. In fact, their first idea was steering where they looked.

That is the unsettling part. The Einstellung effect does not feel like being stuck. It feels like thinking. It wears the clothes of thinking so well that the thinker cannot tell the difference.

Why we do it

The habit is not foolish. It is thrift. The brain is built to save its effort, and when a problem wears a familiar face, the old answer is fast and usually good enough. Each time a method works, the path to it wears a little deeper, and the next time the mind goes there without being asked. Most days this is a gift. We call it experience.

The trouble comes when a problem only looks familiar. The old answer arrives first, and it arrives sure of itself. Studies find that the effect grows heavier under stress and under time pressure. When the stakes rise and the clock runs, we hold tightest to what we already know, the way a frightened person holds a railing.

Fifty-five minutes on the problem

There is a well-known line attributed to Albert Einstein. If he had an hour to solve a problem, he would spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.

Einstein probably never said it. Quote Investigator, which traces the origins of famous quotes, found no evidence that he did. The earliest version it found dates to 1945 and credits an Indiana University mathematics professor, Robert Aley, who said he would spend the first fifty minutes studying a problem before making a mark. Over the years the line wandered away from Aley and came to rest with the most famous scientist anyone could name. That wandering is the same habit in small. Even our quotations go home to what is familiar.

The advice holds, whoever said it. Time spent understanding a problem loosens the grip of the first answer.

The man with a hammer

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s longtime partner, worked on the same problem from another direction. He called it “man with a hammer syndrome.” In a 2003 lecture he put it plainly: “To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks pretty much like a nail.”

Munger’s cure was to carry more tools. He argued for learning the big ideas from many fields and running through them “checklist-style” when facing a hard problem. He also liked to work problems backward. “Invert, always invert,” he would say, borrowing from the mathematician Carl Jacobi. Instead of asking how to succeed, ask what would guarantee failure, and avoid it. Both habits do the same work. They force a second look before the first answer wins.

What this means for business

Companies carry the Einstellung effect too. They carry it in their budgets and their org charts and their memory of what saved them last time. A business that cut its way out of trouble once will reach for the knife again. A team that fixed the last problem with a new hire will start looking for another. Boards ask for new goals. Vendors arrive holding the thing they sell. Each answer may be reasonable. The danger is that it walks in the door before anyone has looked hard at the problem.

The effect is strongest when it matters most. A struggling business line or a failing function comes with pressure, with deadlines, with people who need to see something done. That is the weather in which we grip hardest what we already know.

This is why my approach starts with diagnosis and stays there longer than feels comfortable. A few practices help.

• Separate the problem from the solution. Name what is happening before anyone proposes what to do.
• Decide whether the problem is operational or strategic before choosing a fix. The two look alike from a distance and need very different answers.
• Collect several explanations, not one. I ask each executive for their own hypothesis and the experiment they would run to test it. Then the data decides.
• Invert. Ask what would make the situation worse, and check whether the company is already doing it.
• Notice the familiar answer. When a team keeps returning to the same fix, ask whether it has truly looked anywhere else.

None of this is slow for its own sake. The time given to the problem is what lets the solution hold. The better answer is usually there, often in plain sight, waiting. Finding it takes the discipline to keep looking after the first answer has made itself at home.