Getting Out of Our Conceptual Ruts Strategies for Expanding Conceptual Frameworks

The human tendency to think recurring thoughts limits our theories and research. This article presents four sets of strategies that may be useful for generating new perspectives on familiar research problems: playing with ideas, considering contexts, probing and tinkering with assumptions, and clarifying and systematizing the conceptual frame. In 1879, Sir Francis Galton published an article describing a leisurely stroll he took in the interests of science--specifically to explore how the mind works. In the article, Galton told of walking down a London street and scrutinizing every object that came into his view. He recorded the first thought or two that occurred to him as he focused on each of about 300 objects. Galton reported that this method produced a great variety of associations, including memories of events that had occurred years earlier. After several days, Galton repeated the walk and the recording procedure and again found a variety of associations. He also discovered a great deal of repetition or overlap in his thoughts on the two occasions. Galton likened his thoughts to actors in theater processions in which the players march off one side of the stage and reappear on the other. This recurrence of ideas piqued Galton's curiosity. He next devised some word association tasks that led him to the same conclusion as his walks, namely, that "the roadways of our minds are worn into very deep ruts" (Galton, 1879, cited by Crovitz, 1970, p. 35). Although Galton's methods may have been faulty by present standards, he seems to have discovered a stable psychological principle: the recurrence of ideas (Crovitz, 1970). My comments here assume that Galton was rightwthat our thoughts flow in a limited number of channels and that our research efforts are thereby constrained. This article sketches a variety of approaches for stimulating new insights on familiar research problems. Four sets of strategies, phrased as advice to researchers, are discussed as follows: 1. Researchers should play with ideas through a process of selecting and applying metaphors, representing ideas graphically, changing the scale, and attending to process. 2. Researchers should consider contexts. They can place specific problems in a larger domain, make comparisons outside the problem domain, examine processes in the settings in which they naturally occur, consider the practical implications of research, and probe library resources. 3. It is important for researchers to probe and tinker with assumptions through such techniques as exposing hidden assumptions, making the opposite assumption, and simultaneously trusting and doubting the same assumption. 4. Finally, it is vital that researchers clarify and systematize their conceptual frameworks. They should scrutinize the meanings of key concepts, specify relationships among concepts, and write a concept paper. The need for psychologists to attend to conceptual framing processes has been widely acknowledged (see, for example, Brinberg & McGrath, 1985; Campbell, Daft, & Hulin, 1982; Caplan & Nelson, 1973; Gergen, 1978, 1982; Jones, 1983; McGuire, 1973, in press; Tyler, 1983; Wachtel, 1980; Weick, 1979). Several caveats are in order before we proceed: 1. Some readers may already be familiar with certain strategies and find them obvious. I have tried to include a diversity of heuristics in the hope that even seasoned investigators will find something of value. 2. Given the goal of presenting a range of strategies, only limited space is available for describing and illustrating each procedure. There is a risk that important and complex topics have been oversimplified-possibly even trivialized. I strongly recommend further reading on any strategy that seems promising; references are provided in the text. 3. These strategies are offered as heuristics. Most have not been systematically evaluated, although they have been useful to the scholars who proposed them and to others who have used them. 4. The substantial and important psychological literature on problem solving and critical and creative thinking has not been reviewed or even cited here. Much of that research addresses problems for which there are consensual solutions derived from mathematical or other logical systems. And some of that 1094 October 1985 • American Psychologist Copyright 1985 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 00034)66X/85/$00.75 Vol. 40, No. 10, 1094-1103 literature presumes that thinking habits developed from work on abstract puzzles or exercises are readily transferable to a wide range of other problems. The present concern is how to generate useful ideas whose "accuracy" cannot immediately be assessed. The following strategies draw upon, and in some cases expand, the researcher's existing knowledge structures (cf. Glaser, 1984). They are directly applicable to research problems in all areas of psychology.