Since subjects hear these two stories back to back, you might think almost everyone would leap to the convergence solution for the medical problem. They don’t. A typical success rate is 30%. Since about 10% of subjects who don’t hear the military problem offer the convergence solution, only one in five subjects transferred what they learned. To reach a high (roughly 75%) success rate, you need to teach subjects the first story, then bluntly tell them to use the first story to solve the second.37 To repeat, such experiments measure how humans “learn how to think” under ideal conditions:
