Ever watch someone struggle with a new product interface because they’re stuck in old patterns?
That’s the Einstellung Effect at work.
You might recall that I referenced it a few days ago when talking about why we’ve all accepted terrible packaging for products like batteries. It really is a thing.
Back in 1942, psychologist Abraham Luchins ran a unique experiment. He gave people water jugs and simple problems to solve, filling larger jugs from smaller ones.
After learning one solution pattern, participants kept using it — even when obviously better solutions were supplied.
Meanwhile, new participants introduced to the same options, but who hadn’t used the previous jugs, immediately saw the easier solutions.
He called it “Einstellung” — German for “setting” or “installation” — because it showed how our minds get installed with patterns we can’t easily uninstall.
(I remember the weird name by thinking of it as the “Installing Effect.”)
People’s brains actually get blocked from seeing the easier path.
You start seeing this everywhere when you look for it:
- iPhone users resist Android‘s back button
- Excel wizards fight learning Airtable (even though it can do so much more)
- Teams users dismiss smoother, faster video tools
- Manual transmission drivers scoff at automatics
The implications for product makers are SUPER important:
Know how we say, “I can’t unsee it now”?
Well, if your innovation requires people to unlearn something, you’re fighting their installed mental shortcuts. Their brain will actively resist your better solution.
This is another reason why so many great products fail: the challengers are asking people to abandon installed and trusted patterns.
Tesla confused everyone by removing the start button — because why do you need to “start” an electric car? If you’ve driven a car lot’s demo car with a push-button, you may have noticed key gouges where drivers automatically attempted to do it the old way.
Status quo bias is not a single form of resistance to adoption.
It’s a complicated mix of factors that include the Einstellung Effect.
And it’s something we should probably all be thinking about more seriously.
When your tank brain gets comfortable with a solution, your dog brain fights to defend it — even when something vastly better comes along.
The new thing has to fight back by being CLEARLY more exciting, and must leverage that excitement. Like by whipping up dreams of a fantastic new Coveted Condition.
You’ve got to uninstall and obliterate the old thing before installing something new and better.
Action for today: With this new knowledge, think through your customer’s existing behavior patterns. Where do they need to unlearn and uninstall something to embrace your solution? That could be your biggest barrier.
Breaking habits is way harder than building them. At Graphos Product, we’ve spent 30+ years helping innovators identify and break free from experience traps — it’s also how we keep our product expertise sharp and relevant. Want to explore fresh approaches to your product challenges? Just hit reply.
Laurier
Product Payoff: Remember how mystifying “the cloud” seemed at first? (I still think it’s a bad name, and even IT professionals struggle to explain it.) Dropbox faced this challenge head-on when it launched. Users were deeply stuck in their save-local-and-share-USB-drives pattern, which went back to floppy disks. But by using the familiar desktop folder interface and the simple tagline “It’s just like a magic pocket,” (coupled with an ambitious referral program) they helped people uninstall their old thinking. The result? Dropbox leapt from 100,000 to 4 million users in just 15 months.