The Candle Problem

The Intricacies of the Brain and Its Problem-Solving Capacity

E. Y. Nam

YOU ARE GIVEN THE FOLLOWING ITEMS:

–        A candle

–        A box of matches

–        A box of thumbtacks

These items are laid on a table placed against the wall of an otherwise empty room. Your task is to attach a lit candle to the wall in a way so that the candle wax does not drip onto the table or floor. So, how would you go about this?

Diagram of the experiment

The most effective solution most of you did not use was to empty the box of thumbtacks, use the thumbtacks to hammer the box into the wall, and place the lit candle in the box.

Diagram of the solution

The Candle Problem was posthumously published by Karl Duncker in 1945. Seemingly a straightforward problem, this logic problem required more out-of-the-box thinking than originally thought of. It required participants to overcome their tendency for “functional fixedness”, which refers to the fallibility of only seeing the box as a device to hold the thumbtacks and not immediately perceiving it as a separate and functional component available to be used in solving the task. In this scenario, participants needed to be creative, to use the box to think outside the box.

A variation of this problem was presented to the participants where the thumbtacks were placed next to the box. Participants figured out the solution much more quickly.

Glucksberg, in 1962, made another variation to this experiment. This time, he offered one group a monetary incentive for the fastest time to solve the problem and another group with no prize, termed “low-drive”.

Glucksberg discovered that if the tacks were laid out separately from the box, the group with the reward solved the problem much quicker than the low-drive group. However, if the tacks were in the box, the group without the monetary incentive would have solved it faster. Why? How does a simple change affect the entire outcome? It was because participants with a monetary incentive had their creativity hindered through their focus on the end prize, disregarding all logical steps to solve the problem.

This experiment has been repeated and replicated over and over again for nearly 40 years. The contingent motivators-“if you do this, then you get that”- work out in some circumstances. However, as demonstrated by the Candle Problem, this “fight or flight” response caused by turning the scenario into a competition for a prized resource created mild levels of stress, effectively shutting down the problem-solving part of the prefrontal cortex. Interesting way to forcibly prohibit creativity when acting out a task.