Our mind’s affinity for Additive over Subtractive
Came across this article that I personally think is kinda intriguing and “noteworthy” to be shortified!
In some European cities, for example, urban planners have gotten rid of traffic lights and road signs to make streets safer — an idea that runs counter to conventional traffic design. Why would someone come with an idea to remove the support wheels to train the children with balance bikes instead, only now?
Minimalist designs, in which elements are removed from an existing model, are uncommon. This article presents a Hypothesis through a psychological explanation that when faced with a problem, people tend to add more elements rather than take away existing ones
Investigation on whether, and to what extent, people actually overlooked subtraction when they’re tasked with changing things wasn’t literature driven, because there’s [no academic] literature on this phenomenon.
A study where Group1 was provided a cue about potential subtractive solutions by being told, “Each piece that you add costs ten cents but removing pieces is free,” while Group2 was just told, “Each piece that you add costs ten cents.” Almost two-thirds of people in the cued group ended up choosing to eliminate the single block rather than adding new ones, compared with 41 percent of those who had not received the prompt.
Similar observations were noted across diverse tasks, where the vast majority of people chose to augment rather than remove
Some key takeaways from this article :
- People are more likely to remove features when they are given more opportunities to consider alternative ways to address a problem
- Given only one chance to solve a problem it is almost always additions and not subtractions
- Having cognitive pressure might also make people add more than remove
- Additive solutions have a sort of privileged status —” come to mind quickly and easily”
- Subtractive solutions are not necessarily harder to consider , but they take more effort to find
- This article also suggests that the greater likelihood of additive solutions being more appreciated due to so-called sunk-cost bias (investing in things for which time, money, or effort has already been spent)
I think as a product manager, my tending to add new features rather than getting rid of existing ones even though getting rid of some things is clearly a better option, makes me want to revisit how I approach problem-solving. If not for anything else this article makes me think twice about all the neglected subtractions!