In cognitive psychology, heuristics are mental shortcuts the brain uses to solve problems quickly without having to analyze every detail. But there’s also a concept called the Einstellung effect, which describes the tendency to stop looking for better, simpler solutions once we have found one that works. This is not because we’ve become lazy, but our brain doesn’t like wasting resources, so it stops looking for alternatives when there’s already a path that’s worked before. In the original experiments by psychologists Abraham and Edith Luchins in the 1940s, once participants found a method that solved the first few problems, they continued to apply it to subsequent ones, even when a simpler solution was immediately apparent. The known path blocked the obvious and probably more efficient one.

Social psychologists Margaret Clark and Judson Mills spent decades studying two types of relationships: exchange and communal. Exchange relationships work on reciprocity — we give something and expect something in return in an equal and timely manner. This is how businesses typically operate. Communal relationships, by contrast, are based on responsiveness to need. We give because someone needs it; we don’t keep score. Close human relationships, such as friendships and family, naturally depend on this. The problem is that these two systems have very different rules, and most of us don’t even notice when we’ve switched contexts. So, a person who has been heavily reinforced for strategic thinking at work doesn’t consciously decide to treat a conversation with their partner like a negotiation. They do it and therefore expect similar results from the same heuristic that earned them promotions and respect at work when solving problems with their partner. They fail, and they have no idea why. Work tends to become an escape, where they keep succeeding and reinforcing this heuristic.

This misapplication gets worse when success and status enter the picture. Research on power and social cognition, including work by social psychologists Adam Galinsky and Deborah Gruenfeld, suggests that people primed with power become less accurate at reading others’ emotions, less likely to account for others’ ignorance, and less inclined to adopt another person’s perspective spontaneously. Psychologist Dacher Keltner calls this the “power paradox,” noting that the social skills that help people rise in a hierarchy (empathy, generosity, attentiveness) tend to erode once power is secured. And it’s not just behavioral. Neuroscience research has found that feelings of power reduce the brain’s mirror neuron response, a neural mechanism linked to empathy.

The problem isn’t that successful people are emotionally unintelligent, but rather that their most reinforced toolkit gradually becomes the default everywhere. The surgeon who makes decisive calls under pressure brings that same energy to a family dinner where no one has asked for it. The problem-solving lawyer or entrepreneur who identifies inefficiencies in every system begins optimizing their partner’s routine (and even personality). The philosopher Abraham Kaplan called this the “law of the instrument” in 1964: give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. Kaplan was discussing researchers overapplying their preferred methods, but his hammer observation generalizes well in this context.

The misapplied heuristic phenomenon isn’t limited to high achievers and Type A businesspeople. We all do it. The therapist who can’t stop analyzing their friends. The academic who intellectualizes every emotion because that’s how she gets rewarded in her world. The man who grew up in an unpredictable yet overcontrolling home develops a threat-detection system that was essential for survival at seven but becomes a limiting anxiety disorder by 18.

So, heuristics aren’t the problem; they’re inevitable and very necessary. We should be careful, however, to use them appropriately and not too rigidly. Noticing this is the hard part, because the whole point of a heuristic is that it operates below consciousness. But when something that usually works for us keeps failing in one specific area of our lives, maybe the problem isn’t that we’re doing it wrong or that people don’t quite get us. We might just be trying to slice a lemon with a hammer.

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