Question

Monique routinely uses a shredder to shred her paper mail into confetti-sized pieces of paper. When packing her glassware to move into a new apartment, she runs out of protective Styrofoam packing material. Suddenly, Monique remembers about the shredded junk mail confetti which she could use as packing material. From the above scenario, it can be concluded that Monique has:________.
A. overcome functional fixedness.
B. used a heuristic to solve her packing problem.
C. used an algorithm to solve her packing problem.
D. demonstrated object fixation.

Answer 1

Answer:

A. overcome functional fixedness.

Explanation:

In psychology, the term functional fixedness refers to a cognitive bias by which the person uses an object only in the way it is usually used and doesn't find new creative forms to use it (and therefore the person is fixed in one function of the object).

In this example, Monique used a shredder to shred paper (traditional form of using it), when she runs out of styrofoam she remembers the junk mail confetti from the shredder and she uses it as packing material. We can see that she is finding new creative forms to use this confetti instead of just leaving there, therefore, we can say that she has overcome functional fixedness.