Albert Einstein once observed that if he had only an hour to tackle a daunting problem, he would spend fifty-five minutes striving to understand it and just five minutes on devising a solution. This conviction reflects his belief that the real difficulty of problem-solving does not lie in producing answers but in first discerning the true nature of the challenge. His insight has continued to resonate across disciplines, and it has recently received new empirical support in research conducted through a large-scale mobile phone experiment led by economists at the University of Miami, the Patti and Allan Herbert Business School, and HEC Paris.

At the heart of this work is Alex Horenstein, associate professor in the Department of Economics and associate dean of undergraduate business studies at Miami Herbert, who joined forces with Konrad Grabiszewski of HEC Paris. Together, they designed Blues and Reds, a mobile strategy game that cleverly doubled as a behavioural experiment. By embedding decision-making scenarios within the framework of a smartphone game, the two researchers were able to collect data from over 7,000 participants spread across more than 100 countries. Their findings were published in Games and Economic Behavior, a respected journal devoted to game theory and its practical applications.

The experiment revealed that people often fail not because they cannot solve problems, but because they misunderstand the very issues they are asked to solve. Horenstein explained this through a simple analogy: if someone wants to travel from Point A to Point B and calculates the shortest route without noticing that one of the streets is one-way, the solution is rendered useless. The individual may have solved the wrong problem with logical precision, but the oversight of a key detail—the one-way restriction—led to the bad outcome. This example captures the central lesson: accurate understanding is the indispensable first step in successful problem-solving.

The origins of Blues and Reds can be traced back to a 2015 Metrorail ride Horenstein and Grabiszewski shared in Miami. Observing their fellow passengers absorbed in mobile phones, the economists wondered whether the devices could serve as more than distractions. If people were already immersed in these digital spaces, why not create an experiment that harnessed this engagement? That insight gave rise to the idea of running a behavioural study directly within a mobile game, eliminating the constraints of laboratory research and reaching participants in their natural environments.

In practice, Blues and Reds presented players with strategic problems in two distinct formats. One version laid out the entire decision tree, showing every possible move and outcome, making the structure of the problem transparent. The other version withheld this map, forcing participants to piece together the links between choices and consequences on their own. This second mode demanded greater cognitive effort, as players had to reconstruct the underlying problem before attempting to solve it. The contrast between the two versions offered compelling evidence of how deeply understanding a problem’s structure influences the quality of the solution.

Although the app has since been retired after completing its data-gathering phase, its legacy remains significant. It demonstrated not only that misunderstanding a problem is often the root cause of failure but also that mobile platforms can serve as powerful tools for conducting large-scale behavioural experiments. By reaching thousands of individuals across diverse cultures and contexts, Blues and Reds confirmed Einstein’s intuition in a modern setting: solving problems effectively begins not with answers, but with a careful and thoughtful comprehension of the questions themselves.

More information: Konrad Grabiszewski et al, Understanding dynamic interactions, Games and Economic Behavior. DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2024.10.010

Journal information: Games and Economic Behavior Provided by University of Miami