 |
 |
Functional fixedness is a phenomenon associated with people's habitual responses to everyday artifacts as mani- fested especially in puzzle-solving. It is not, hopefully, a phenomenon associated with research qua research. Presumably research training is about teaching people precisely to avoid prejudices such as functional fixedness. Functional fixedness would be a warrant for your claim if the 'they' in the second half of that sentence refers to the people doing the behavior being researched, rather than to researchers themselves, as it grammatically does at the moment. Citations are not always needed. But when a sentence seems to be rubbishing the entirety of the human sciences, they can be useful. Cameron On Mar 19, 2012, at 12:00 PM, Don Norman wrote: > With respect to the Norman & Verganti paper: > > On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 8:36 AM, cameron tonkinwise <[log in to unmask]> > wrote: >> >> This claim might need some qualification, if not evidence: >> "The more that researchers study existing human behavior, activities, and >> products, the more they get trapped into existing paradigms." >> page 16 > > I am NOT a believer in giving a citation to every statement in a > paper. This particular statement is supported by such a huge amount > of literature in the psychological sciences on prototypes, > stereotyping, and functional fixedness (look up the rather good > article in Wikipedia on this latter phenomenon, see URL below), that a > literature citation seems quite unnecessary. Moreover, if we tried to > be thorough, the citations might take up more space than the paper > itself. We could even cite Thomas Kuhn's book "The Structure of > Scientific Revolutions." > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_fixedness > > Don