psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

, rigidity or mental rigidity refers to an obstinate inability to yield or a refusal to appreciate another person's viewpoint or emotions characterized by a lack of empathy. It can also refer to the tendency to perseverate, which is the inability to change habits and the inability to modify concepts and attitudes once developed. A specific example of rigidity is

functional fixedness Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used. The concept of functional fixedness originated in Gestalt psychology, a movement in psychology that emphasizes holistic process ...

, which is a difficulty conceiving new uses for familiar objects.

History

Rigidity is an ancient part of our human cognition. Systematic research on rigidity can be found tracing back to

Gestalt psychologists Gestalt-psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology that emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a theory of perception that was a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward T ...

, going as far back as the late 19th to early 20th century with

Max Wertheimer Max Wertheimer (April 15, 1880 – October 12, 1943) was an Austro-Hungarian psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. He is known for his book, ''Productive Thinking'', and f ...

Wolfgang Köhler Wolfgang Köhler (21 January 1887 – 11 June 1967) was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology. During the Nazi regime in Germany, he protest ...

, and

Kurt Koffka Kurt Koffka (March 12, 1886 – November 22, 1941) was a German psychologist and professor. He was born and educated in Berlin, Germany; he died in Northampton, Massachusetts from coronary thrombosis. He was influenced by his maternal uncl ...

in Germany. With more than 100 years of research on the matter there is some established and clear data. Nonetheless, there is still much controversy surrounding several of the fundamental aspects of rigidity. In the early stages of approaching the idea of rigidity, it is treated as "a unidimensional continuum ranging from rigid at one end to flexible at the other". This idea dates back to the 1800s and was later articulated by

Charles Spearman Charles Edward Spearman, FRS (10 September 1863 – 17 September 1945) was an English psychologist known for work in statistics, as a pioneer of factor analysis, and for Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. He also did seminal work on mod ...

who described it as mental inertia. Prior to 1960 many definitions for the term rigidity were afloat. One example includes

Kurt Goldstein Kurt Goldstein (November 6, 1878 – September 19, 1965) was a German neurologist and psychiatrist who created a holistic theory of the organism. Educated in medicine, Goldstein studied under Carl Wernicke and Ludwig Edinger where he focused on n ...

's, which he stated, "adherence to a present performance in an inadequate way", another being

Milton Rokeach Milton Rokeach (born in Hrubieszów as Mendel Rokicz, December 27, 1918 – October 25, 1988) was a Polish-American social psychologist. He taught at Michigan State University, the University of Western Ontario, Washington State University, and t ...

saying the definition was, " heinability to change one's set when the objective conditions demand it". Others have simplified rigidity down to stages for easy defining. Generally, it is agreed upon that it is evidenced by the identification of mental or behavioral sets. Lewin and Kounin also proposed a theory of cognitive rigidity (also called Lewin-Kounin formulation) based on a Gestalt perspective and they used it to explain a behavior in mentally retarded persons that is inflexible, repetitive, and unchanging. The theory proposed that it is caused by a greater "stiffness" or impermeability between inner-personal regions of individuals, which influence behavior. Rigidity was particularly explored in Lewin's views regarding the degree of differentiation among children. He posited that a mentally retarded child can be distinguished from the normal child due to the smaller capacity for dynamic rearrangement in terms of his psychical systems.

Mental set

Mental set In psychology, rigidity or mental rigidity refers to an obstinate inability to yield or a refusal to appreciate another person's viewpoint or emotions characterized by a lack of empathy. It can also refer to the tendency to perseverate, which is the ...

s represent a form of rigidity in which an individual behaves or believes in a certain way due to prior experience. It's a type of cognitive bias that can lead people to make assumptions about how they should solve problems without taking into account all the information available. The opposite of this is termed

cognitive flexibility Cognitive flexibility is an intrinsic property of a cognitive system often associated with the mental ability to adjust its activity and content, switch between different task rules and corresponding behavioral responses, maintain multiple con ...

. These mental sets may not always be consciously recognized by the bearer. In the field of psychology, mental sets are typically examined in the process of problem solving, with an emphasis on the process of breaking away from particular mental sets into formulation of

insight Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect within a particular context. The term insight can have several related meanings: *a piece of information *the act or result of understanding the inner nature of things or of seeing intu ...

. Breaking mental sets in order to successfully resolve problems fall under three typical stages: a) tendency to solve a problem in a fixed way, b) unsuccessfully solving a problem using methods suggested by prior experience, and c) realizing that the solution requires different methods. Components of high executive functioning, such as the interplay between

working memory Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold information temporarily. It is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior. Working memory is often used synonymously with short-term memory, ...

and

inhibition Inhibitor or inhibition may refer to: In biology * Enzyme inhibitor, a substance that binds to an enzyme and decreases the enzyme's activity * Reuptake inhibitor, a substance that increases neurotransmission by blocking the reuptake of a neurotra ...

, are essential to effective switching between mental sets for different situations. Individual differences in mental sets vary, with one study producing a variety of cautious and risky strategies in individual responses to a reaction time test.

Causes

Rigidity can be a learned behavioral trait, for example if the subject has a parent, boss or teacher who demonstrated the same form of behavior towards them. Rigidity is also associated with autism spectrum conditions, and has a genetic component.

Stages

Rigidity has three different main "stages" of severity, although it never has to move to further stages. The first stage is a strict perception that causes one to persist in their ways and be close-minded to other things. The second involves a motive to defend the ego. The third stage is that it is a part of one's personality and you can see it in their perception, cognition, and social interactions.

Traits

We often see traits that occur alongside rigidity.

Accompanying externalizing behaviors

They could be external behaviors, such as the following: * Insistently repetitious behavior * Difficulty with unmet expectations * Perfectionism * Compulsions (as in OCD) * Perseveration

Accompanying internalizing behaviors

Internalizing behaviors also are shown: * Perfectionism * Obsessions (as in OCD)

Manifestations of rigidity

Associated conditions

Cognitive closure

Mental rigidity often features a high need for cognitive closure, meaning that they assign explanations prematurely to things with a determination that this is truth, finding that resolution of the dissonance as reassuring as finding the truth. Then, there is little reason to correct their unconscious misattributions if it would bring uncertainty back.

Autism spectrum disorder

Cognitive rigidity is one feature of

autism spectrum The autism spectrum, often referred to as just autism or in the context of a professional diagnosis autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or autism spectrum condition (ASC), is a neurodevelopmental condition (or conditions) characterized by difficulti ...

disorder (ASD). It is included in what's called the Broader Autism Phenotype, where a collection of autistic traits still fail to reach the level of ASD. This is one example of how rigidity does not show up as a single trait, but comes with a number of related traits.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Scrupulosity

Effects

Ethnocentrism

Rigidity may be a cause of

ethnocentrism Ethnocentrism in social science and anthropology—as well as in colloquial English discourse—means to apply one's own culture or ethnicity as a frame of reference to judge other cultures, practices, behaviors, beliefs, and people, instead of ...

. In one study, M. Rokeach tested for ethnocentrism's relatedness to mental rigidity by using the California Ethnocentrism Scale (when measuring American college students' views) and the California Attitude Scale (when measuring children's views) before they were given what is called by cognitive scientists "the water jar problem." This problem teaches students a set pattern for how to solve each one. Those that scored higher in ethnocentrism also showed attributes of rigidity such as persistence of mental sets and more complicated thought processes.

Strategies for overcoming rigidity

Consequences of unfulfillment

If a person with cognitive rigidity does not fulfill their rigidly held expectations, the following could occur: * Agitation * Aggression * Self-injurious behavior * Depression * Anxiety * Suicidality These are clearly maladaptive, and so there are other ways to overcome this: Use of The Power of TED* & The Winner's Triangle are both Therapeutic models that use the

Karpman_drama_triangle The Karpman drama triangle is a social model of human interaction proposed by Stephen B. Karpman. The triangle maps a type of destructive interaction that can occur among people in conflict. The drama triangle model is a tool used in psychotherapy ...

derived from

Transactional Analysis Transactional Analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social interactions (or “transactions”) are analyzed to determine the ego state of the communicator (whether parent-like, childlike, or adult-like) as a b ...