Archaeologists know that a “Roncofact” is an artifact that you find, and realize (or speculate) that it had multiple functions.”It slices, it dices, it makes Julian Fries….”A recent study claims that humans, in fact, shun Roncofacts. But wait, there’s more..
According to a piece in the New York Times:
In a clever experiment … psychologists had students fill out a survey using a ballpoint pen that could also serve as a laser pointer. They then had half the students evaluate the pen’s laser-pointer function, thus making this group more aware of the pen’s dual purpose. Later,… all the participants [went to] another room [to] complete a short form, next to which sat two pens: a laser-pointer pen and an ordinary office pen. Of the participants who had not been primed about the dual purpose, a little more than half used the laser-pointer pen. But among people who had been primed, fewer than 17 percent picked it….being mindful of an object’s dual purpose made the students reluctant to use it. “Once you associate the pen with another function, that same pen doesn’t come to mind as easily when it comes to writing,” Fishbach explains.What happens, the researchers showed through other studies, is that connecting one tool or method to multiple goals weakens the mental association between that means and any one goal. …You should prefer a stone that kills an extra bird you didn’t have in mind. “But you won’t,” Fishbach says.[source]
I’m not sure how to interpret this. It may well be that specialization is a feature that we recognize as related to effectiveness of a tool. Some have suggested that this is a Neanderthal-Modern Human difference. Neanderthals seemed to have used their tools for a single purpose, while modern humans (contemporary with those Neanderthals) seem to have used a given tool for many purposes. Perhaps the students in this study were Neanderthals. I don’t know.In any event, this is very dangerous talk, and I’ll tell you why. When was the last time you needed a bottle opener to open your beer, and looked around a while before you actually found one? OK, think of that time, and now think: Did it happen to be the case that as you looked around you located one or more items that could have had a bottle opener, but didn’t?For example, a can opener often has a bottle opener built into it. Well, have you noticed that these days fewer and fewer can openers have that bottle opener built into it?In fact, there was a time, corresponding I think to the rise of Ron Popiel of Ronco, but perhaps predating this phenomenon, that everything that could have a bottle opener had a bottle opener. I have (at the cabin) a spatula, you know, like for flipping hamburgers, with a bottle opener built into it. But this approach to design has been lost, and I personally think it is the fault of those faux European designers that Target gets to pretty up the stuff they sell in their housewares department. Those are the guys who are ruining it.Anyway, it seems to me that this research can be used to justify this practice, possibly saving the manufacturers of spatulas and can openers alike millions (in the aggregate, over the years) while causing the rest of us to live in a regressive, devolutionary, world in which we can’t find a bottle opener when we need one.This is the sort of thing that clearly indicates the coming end of our very civilization.
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I think the bottle opener-on-everything started to disappear when beer bottles started being made so you could open them with your hand. I still use a bottle opener (what, is my hand a multipurpose tool?). On the other hand, the cell phone-camera sure is popular, even though I have no real use for a phone that takes pictures or a camera that can be used as a phone. On the other other hand, a hammer sure comes in handy for lots of things you might think a screwdriver would do better. And a screwdriver does a lot of things a lot of other tools might do better, if you just had one.
And a screwdriver does a lot of things a lot of other tools might do better, if you just had one.… which brings us back to getting that damn beer open…
I guess those Swiss Amry knives just sit, unused, in drawers around the world.
Personally, I barely go anywhere without my pseudo leatherman tool on my hip. About the only time I don’t have it on belt or in a pocket is during fancy dress events, and even then it can be found in the glove box. The pointer/pen sounds like something I might like to have, assuming it is reasonably decent at both functions. It certainly would make one less thing for me to tuck into my work bag. I believe if the investigation required the use of both a pointer and a pen, then it would have gotten far different results about the chosen tool. I don’t think it is a shunning of dual purpose mechanisms this study proves, so much as a shunning of pointless multiple functional tools. The bottle opener is a good example of that, with the popularity of pull tabs and twist tops, the bottle opener declined in usefulness and modern kitchen implement designs reflect that. (And I have used a flat head to work my way into a beer bottle.. but that was before I got my swiss army knife on steroids.)
I wonder if this is why so many of my colleagues carry a personal MP3 player AND a smartphone, when I use my smartphone as my music player, thereby having one less item I can lose at the pub after work?
I usually end up using things other than bottle openers… I learned a very useful trick that lets you open a beer bottle with just about any rigid object of roughly appropriate dimensions – kitchen knives, cigarette lighters, spoons, etc. It involves wrapping one hand around the neck of the bottle and using the knuckles as a fulcrum to lever the top off. Very effective it is too.As for a Neanderthal / modern human difference – isn’t the classic Mesolithic microlith pretty much the ultimate Roncofact?
The classic microlithic technology post dates the period I’m talking about, which was the Middle Stone Age or Middle Paleolithic, where archaeologists have had the opportunity to compare likely Neanderthal sites with likely Modern Human sites that occur in the same area, alternately, over several tens of thousands of years, alternating.Yes, that’s a great technique for opening the beer bottle! Just don’t use Grandma’s heirloom flatware…
It is not clear from the article that they have been able to distinguish between a single tool that is used to perform multiple functions and a single object that embodies multiple tools. The classic examples of these in our culture are knives, which hearkens back to the proposed differences between neandertals and sapiens. I am unaware of any multiple tools in a single object predating the Bronze Age, but several social anthropological studies have identified multi-function single tool uses in pre-metal societies.
I think that it should be noted that there is a potential difference between use and acquisitional value. Note that they just used the pens to write and, I presume, left them on the table. I wonder how things would change if they were allowed to take one of the pens home. That is, people may prefer a single-function object to perform that function, but if they have to choose between two objects for long-term use (say buying something from a Ronco infomercial), will they still prefer a single-use item, or will they take the multi-use item in preference?
RM: Brilliant.
Thanks – I have terrible trouble keeping my timeline of stone-age technology right.
The conclusion is stupid. If the students had only been offered the pen/laser, they would have used it. That they preferred the pen-only doesn’t demonstrate shunning anything.