What do you do when you find yourself in a sticky situation and you need to find a solution? Do you try to add some element to it in the hope that it would improve the overall situation? If so, you are not alone. A recent study shows that when people are looking to improve a situation, idea or object, an overwhelming majority of them try to add something to it, irrespective of whether it helps or not. This also means that people never stop to think and remove something as a solution, even if it might actually work.
In order to understand this better, think about all the adults working from home during the ongoing pandemic. You must have noticed that many of them, maybe even your parents, have complained about attending endless meetings that eat into their schedule, giving them little time to do actual work. This is a classic case of adding more and more meetings to make up for office environment, with little thought going into whether all those meetings are actually required. A simpler solution might have been to stick to existing schedules or maybe even cutting down some meetings (consider the fatigue involved in video calls as opposed to face-to-face encounters) and making communication within an organisation more efficient.
In a paper that featured in Nature, researchers from the University of Virginia looked at why people overlook subtractive ideas altogether in all kinds of context. They stated that additive ideas come more quickly and easily, whereas subtractive ones need more effort. As we are living in a fast-paced world where we are likely to implement the first ideas that occur to us, this means that additive solutions are largely accepted, without even considering subtractive ones.
Self-reinforcing effect
This further has a self-reinforcing effect. As we rely more and more on additive ideas, they become more easily accessible to us. With time, this becomes a habit, meaning our brains have a strong urge to look for additive ideas. As a result, the ability to improve the world through subtractive strategies is lost on us.
While the interesting finding of the research, which has overlaps between behavioural science and engineering, could have plenty of application across sectors, researchers believe it could be particularly useful in how we harness technology.
Less is more
The results highlight humanity’s overwhelming focus on always adding, even when the correct answer might actually to be subtract something. While this holds true for everything from people struggling with overfull schedules to institutions finding it hard to adhere to more and more rules, it also shows how we are inherently geared towards exhausting more of our planet’s resources. A minimalist approach of less is more might word wonders in a lot of situations.
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