Exploring the Depths of Thought: Analogies

Good day, family ♥️. I've been out for two days now due to some network issues. It felt like the Stone Age for a while there. But thankfully, it's restored so we can continue from where we left off in our blog-isodes.

Please consider visiting our previous blog-isode to get the full idea of what we will be discussing today:

Exploring the Depths of Thought: Mental set and Motivation

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Some problems seem to have a similar structure (causing us to use mental sets).

Such similarities are often seen in the problems of everyday life. The school counsellor who advises teenagers is likely to find that the problem she hears about today reminds her of one she has heard about a few months back, and her experience with the first generally helps her in understanding the second.

What holds for the real world also holds for the laboratory.

Sometimes new problems are solved by analogy with similar ones encountered earlier.

In one study, subjects were first exposed to an analogue of the ray-tumor problem.

They read a story about a general who had to attack a fortress but faced a dilemma:

The fortress was protected against attack because all the roads that led to
it were mined. While the mines were set to be detonated by a large body of men passing over them at one time, small groups of men would not set them off.

Given this situation, the general divided his army into small groups and dispatched each of them to a different road. When he gave the signal, they each marched to the fortress, where they converged and attacked successfully.

After reading this story, the subjects were given the ray-tumor problem.

Remember?

Exploring the Depths of Thought: Automization, Chunking and Problem Solving.
https://img.inleo.io/DQmbjzJraCdZWDwhjK6xNEp4qRm6Afm12y854c56bSToHMB/photo-1536995769641-12e9f98fd223%20(2).jpeg
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The structural similarity between the ray-tumor problem and the general's dilemma is clear enough:

In both cases, a force must be initially dispersed and later brought to convergence.

But does exposure to the one problem help subjects to solve the other one?

It does, if they see the analogy.

If they are given a hint that the military story may help them, about 80 percent of them solve the ray-tumor problem compared with only 10 percent of the control subjects.

But if the subjects merely hear the general's story without being informed of its relevance, the beneficial effect is much weaker (about 20 percent).

Mere exposure to an analogy is evidently not enough if the analogy is not recognized as such. But it may come to mind if it is somehow made more memorable.

After hearing an additional story analogue (the second featured an oil-well fire extinguished by the use of multiple converging hoses), the number of subjects who solved the ray-tumor problem rose to about 45 percent.

It's clear that analogies can help in finding a solution.

But the analogy must be the right one.

This point is illustrated by another study in which experts and novices were asked to classify physics problems according to their similarity.

Novices sorted the problems according to their surface similarity, for example, by whether they involved inclined planes or pulleys.

In contrast, experts classified the problems according to the underlying physical principles that applied to them, such as
the law of conservation of energy.

The trick is to find the right analogy and to see its relevance.

In many cases, a problem seems difficult because it is not correctly interpreted.

To solve it, it has to be looked at in a new way; technically speaking, it requires change in the way it is represented.

Let's See some examples:

Suppose subject A and subject B have the same amount of money. How much must A give B so that B has $10 more than A?

Here the crucial recognition is that B's gain is necessarily A's loss.

Every dollar A gives to B must be represented as a net change of two dollars: one
gained by B and one lost to A.

Since we need a net change of $10, the answer is $5.

Keep this in mind, as we are going to build on it in the next blog-isode.

The Bus Stops Here for today:

Thank you, friends, for staying with me through these blogisodes. Your thoughts and opinions are always welcome and appreciated. I'd be happy to hear them. Until then, stay safe, friends.♥️

References and Links:

https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Psychology/Cognitive_Psychology/Cognitive_Psychology_(Andrade_and_Walker)/06%3A_Problem_Solving/6.04%3A_Reasoning_by_Analogy#:~:text=The%20solution%20to%20the%20problem,ray%20at%20its%20full%20intensity.

http://cognitivepsychology.wikidot.com/problem-solving:analogy

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6297678/#:~:text=A%20mental%20set%20generally%20refers,short%2Dterm%20mental%20set).

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-mental-set-2795370

https://pressbooks.online.ucf.edu/lumenpsychology/chapter/reading-pitfalls-to-problem/#:~:text=A%20mental%20set%20is%20where,what%20it%20was%20designed%20for.

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