Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, was one of motor racing's most influential engineers. He summed up his philosophy as "simplify, then add lightness". A simple, featherweight car might be slower on the straights than a beefy muscle-machine, he reasoned. But it would be faster everywhere else. Between 1962 and 1978 Lotus won seven Formula One constructors championships.
It appears to be an uncommon insight since humans always struggle with subtractive thinking. When asked to improve something, they tend to suggest adding new things rather than removing some, even when additions lead to not satisfying results. In one study conducted by Gabrielle Adams, along with colleagues at the University of Virginia, participants were asked to change a pattern on a grid (网格) of coloured squares to make it balanced. Although that could be done equally well by adding new squares or by deleting existing ones, 78% chose the additive option.
But why people forget that less is often more? One experiment asked participants to redesign an unbalanced Lego structure so that it could support a house-brick. Participants could earn a dollar for fixing the problem, but each piece of Lego they added cut that reward by ten cents. Even then, only 41% worked out that simplifying the structure by removing a single block, rather than complicating it by adding more, was the way to maximise the payout. Practice improved people's chances of spotting subtractive solutions, suggesting that many were simply not thinking of the possibility, at least at first.
What all this amounts to is evidence for " additive thinking" entering the list of" cognitive biases" (认知偏差). The 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded for demonstrating that humans are not thinking logically as economists do. Instead of thinking a problem through and coming up with an ideal solution, they tend to use cognitive shortcuts that are fast and—mostly—"good enough".