more, more, more
a cognitive bias of always adding, never subtracting and its impact on futures thinking
Hello, this is Six Impossible Futures, a newsletter that helps you develop a critical perspective on what’s possible. Today, digging into our tendency to solve problems by piling more on.
If you ever played Jenga, you might have noticed that pulling out a block takes a lot more effort, time and consideration than placing it on top of the tower. The game is simple: players take turns removing one block at a time from a tower of 54 and stacking them on top of the increasingly unstable construction. The game ends when the tower collapses. Technically, either action carries the risk of knocking the tower over, but the odds of failure are much higher during the removal phase. Placing a block allows you to choose an easy spot while removing one means dealing with the tower’s existing constraints. (Although if you try to shove a block back into the middle of the shaky construction, good luck with that one.)
The game of Jenga illustrates the cognitive gap in difficulty between addition and subtraction. This difference fuels additive solution bias, a newly confirmed cognitive bias that pushes us to prefer certain approaches to problem-solving. In a 2021 paper featured on the cover of Nature, behavioral scientists from the University of Virginia analyzed eight experiments in which people had to modify an object, idea, or situation. The research team concludes that we systematically default to solving problems by adding rather than removing. When faced with a puzzle, we are several times more likely to assume that something must be missing rather than consider that something might need to go.
Researchers believe that
We’re missing an entire class of solutions. […] Additive ideas come to mind quickly and easily, but subtractive ideas require more cognitive effort. Because people are often moving fast and working with the first ideas that come to mind, they end up accepting additive solutions without considering subtraction at all.
The study is recent, but the pattern is ancient. Our urge to add is everywhere, shaping personal, professional, and societal decisions. To borrow a line from Amanda Montell in The Age of Magical Overthinking:
Additive solution bias explains why, during a recent attempt to improve my sleep routine, I decided to spend $100 on lavender pillow spray, a tub of adaptogen powder, and a sunrise alarm clock instead of just cutting the afternoon espresso and keeping my phone out of the bedroom. I tried to add half a dozen colored blocks to solve my problem, when the answer was simply removing the two in my way.
Overstuffed wardrobes come from trying to fix the nothing-to-wear problem by buying new items. Code developers patch over problems by piling on new lines of code until the system turns into a Frankenstein no one dares to touch. Urban planners expand road networks to ease congestion, only to see traffic return worse than before. The additive bias scales from the smallest personal decisions to major policy proposals.
Well, how does this thinking error affect our capacity to think about futures? I’d say that the additive bias leads to several problematic outcomes. In the broadest sense, it skews our thinking to envision futures shaped by addition and expansion and rarely futures shaped by less. No wonder the most cliché images of the future are about more. (If Earth feels maxed out, just add Mars, right?) This bias limits our capacity to see subtraction as a productive force.
It’s one thing if this happens by accident, simply because we overlook alternatives. It’s worse when the bias is actively leveraged by the systems we operate within — and the people behind these systems. Let’s give thought to three concerns.
For one, additive solution bias fuels solutionist thinking.
Today, this manifests as techno-solutionism, or simply the techno-fix, an assumption that all problems can find solutions in better and new technologies. One critic, Evgeny Morozov defines it as
Recasting all complex social situations either as neat problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized
For a deeper look at this, I recommend a recent piece from
, in which he critiques the convenience of placing our hopes on some imminent technological breakthrough — a deus ex machina to solve crises of our own making. This miraculous thinking distracts from the necessity of collective effort. He also pinpoints how science fiction and venture capital rely on similar narrative structures. Over at , James offers another angle on techno-fixes, pointing out how our brains are wired to chase novelty.This gravitation towards novelty, often dubbed Shiny Object Syndrome, keeps us chasing the next big thing, fueled by a belief that there is something worth pursuing. We cling to the hope that the next breakthrough will be the one that magically solves everything in an instant. And, as Dave notes, how convenient would it be if its arrival date was soon, just when it is needed most?
Take climate crisis. We pour immense resources into searching for a one-of-a-kind solution to mitigate or reverse global warming, while adaptation efforts and mobilizing public action lag behind. According to the Climate Policy Initiative, 90% of climate-related investments go toward mitigation. 5% of the money goes to mixed objectives and a mere 5% — to adaptation, or changing our behavior and systems to adjust to the actual or expected future climate.
Of course, we need emergent technologies. After all, when it comes to climate change, the more we can mitigate, the less we’ll have to adapt. And I won’t lie, some of them sound cool. A vaccine that makes cows burp less methane is next-level. But technological solutions receive a disproportionate share of attention, funding, and influence, often foreshadowing (with or without intention) the need to change our systems and structures on a deeper level. I mean, wouldn’t reducing, rationing, or banning meat consumption in the first place be more effective than addressing cow’s burping? Additive solution bias may keep us chasing the next innovation instead of questioning the structures that created the problem.
And this connects to the next point. Additive solutions make for a perfect smokescreen. If there’s one takeaway, it’s this: additive solutions can be carefully tailored to minimally influence the status quo.
Think back to Jenga: placing a block on top follows the game’s rules, but it doesn’t drastically change the structure. Additive solutions can be designed by interested parties to push all the novelty buttons in our brains, giving the illusion of change, while ensuring that nothing fundamentally shifts.
Consider cities promoting electric cars instead of rethinking urban infrastructure to reduce car dependency. Or resilience training for employees to “cope with stress”, while workloads remain unchanged.
Paradoxically, innovation teams of many for-profit companies function less as agents of change and more as guardians of the status quo. As Oli Mould, a researcher of creativity and capitalism, writes in Against Creativity:
The dominant narrative of creativity is one of creating more of the same. Contemporary capitalism has commandeered creativity to ensure its own growth and maintain the centralization and monetization of what it generates.
Futures imagined within the structures of the present will always be more of the same. So, defaulting to additive solutions without questioning what needs to be removed at all, is a missed opportunity to create meaningful change and a way to protect the status quo.
The way we think about futures is riddled with biases, and I am curious to explore them. Drop a suggestion for the next one I should unpack.
The last but no less important consequence of additive solution bias is that it reinforces the growth paradigm.
Philosophically, subtraction is not just efficiency, it’s a rejection of the idea that growth and expansion are always better. The logic of economic growth spills over into how we think about pretty much everything, and naturally, growth asymmetrically favors addition. Futures of less don’t align with this logic, making them harder to imagine. As I wrote in my last essay, we are taught by our socio-cultural environment that certain futures are simply not possible or not viable, so we don’t consider them at all. By constantly envisioning futures of more, we push ourselves deeper into the spiral of the paradigm we should be questioning.
To understand why this bias persists, let’s break down some factors that reinforce it. First, adding is simply easier. Living in a world of addition feels intuitive and repeatable, while subtraction forces us to confront complexity. (As kids, we grasp addition earlier than subtraction because the latter requires understanding more advanced concepts like sums.) Subtraction requires a deeper understanding of how parts of the metaphorical Jenga tower interact, otherwise, we risk running into the problem of Chesterton's Fence: without fully understanding why something is there, we might unintentionally break something we didn’t anticipate. (Ironically enough, additive solutions also lead to unintended consequences, but they tend to surface later and seem unrelated to the change in question, so they are easier to ignore.)
Then, the authors of the 2021 study suggest that this thinking error reinforces itself: the more we default to adding, the more natural it feels. It can also be connected to the sunk-cost fallacy – the tendency to stick with something just because we've already invested in it, even when stopping would be better.
Socially, subtraction is a harder sell. It’s easier to get credit for introducing something new than for taking something away, and removing things can create enemies. I’d count the corporate factor as well. This entire system runs on the logic of growth, that I’ve discussed earlier. The pressure is to act now, fix things fast, and show results. (I remember a remark from a Futures Literacy Lab that I organized: “I don’t have time to think. I only have time to think and produce at the same time”.) In this setting, we can sideline deeper structural changes, often requiring time and careful consideration.
I started this essay to understand how additive solution bias skews futures thinking. But writing it made me realize that futures thinking can in fact be the antidote. By explicitly exploring multiple alternative futures, including those created by simplification, we expand our solution space. A critical futures lens helps expose solutionism and fake ‘innovations’ that protect the status quo. And tools like Futures Wheel allow us to map second and third-order consequences of our decisions, bridging the cognitive gap between addition and subtraction. Futures thinking hence isn’t just about imagining what could be, but also about confronting the mental shortcuts that keep us trapped in what already is.
P.S. While researching this topic, I came across a book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, written by one of the researchers who confirmed the bias. It looks like a great deep dive for those who want to explore further.
So true. Thx for the mention btw!