Piercing Cultural Hegemony
Functional Fixedness
Cultural Hegemony can be slippery to understand, especially when you realize how effortlessly it leads people to embrace the elite's rules and values. The secret behind this lies in the subtle power of the halo effect.
The halo effect does more than simply dress up elite ideas and objects in an attractive light. It stamps them into our memory, making them feel unshakable. Through endless repetition, these ideas echo until they seem like the only answers that could ever exist.
Many people have heard of functional illiteracy, but functional fixedness is a newer idea from Gestalt psychology. It describes a mental block that stops us from using objects, ideas, or customs in new ways to solve problems.
This mental trap blinds us to new possibilities, locking us into the familiar uses of things. Functional fixedness leads us to believe that tradition and convention are the only paths, causing us to overlook creative alternatives.
Picasso and his African masks