ABSTRACT
Although flexibility could be an adaptive capacity of individuals (Payne et al. 1993), this adaptation does not always happen. In situations where a person should be flexible in order to deal with changes in the environment, but fails to do so, we speak of cognitive inflexibility. An example of this inflexibility occurs when actions that have shown to be effective in previous situations are insistently carried out in new situations where they are ineffective. For instance, imagine that we are inside a room and try persistently to open the door by pulling it (as it is normally the case), but the door remains closed. We could think that the door is broken instead of trying to open the door by pushing it. What is the problem? It is possible that we are not addressing the lack of space inside the room or that we do not know that in these kinds of buildings doors open in a different way. Research on cognitive flexibility and cognitive inflexibility has led to the proposal of explicative hypotheses of these phenomena. We will consider all of these in the following section.
