Mental Constructs and the Cognitive Reconstruction of the Berlin Wall

Abstract

In this study of how to change people's conceptions of certain facts (i.e., the position of the Berlin Wall), a surprising psychological phenomenon was discovered. In the trial test, instead of designing a wall to enclose West Berlin, most people described and drew a short and straight wall that divided the city from north to south. Two methods were created, based on two general information-processing components involved in problem solving, to study how people might repair their misconceptions by themselves. The do-it-yourself method consisted of providing people with the task of thinking about how to build the wall and then drawing it, instead of just asking them to draw it. The distance-to-goal evaluation method consisted of asking the participants how the wall they had drawn would actually prevent passage from East Germany to West Berlin. The results showed that both methods had important effects in repairing misconceptions, but improvement in performance with the distance-to-goal method was less significant for those participants who were first provided the task of thinking about how to build the wall. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that awareness of functional properties plays an important role in structuring and restructuring mental constructs.