Luckily, it is not the only way to improve a product. We can also think about taking features away but somehow that is a lot harder and rarely if ever does it enter as a natural option into the product development cycle. It’s as if it is against human nature to think like that.
In a recent paper in Nature entitled “People systematically overlook subtractive changes” Gabrielle S. Adams and collaborators investigate how people approach improving objects ideas or situations. They find that we have a tendency to prefer looking to add new changes rather than subtract. This is perhaps the latest addition to the growing list of cognitive biases identified in the field of behavioral economics championed by Nobel laureates like Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler. Cognitive biases describe ways in which we humans act that are not rational in an economic sense.