The horrendously misleading part of this is that the experiment says to attach the candle to the wall. The lexical semantics of "attach" do not permit that you

The horrendously misleading part of this is that the experiment says to attach the candle to the wall. The lexical semantics of "attach" do not permit that you "attach the candle to the wall" by tacking a box to the wall and placing the candle in it. The verb attach simply doesn't mean that -- this demonstrates nothing. Further, numerous studies have been done regarding lexical and conceptual semantics and the role of direct objects in semantic interpretation, and they demonstrate quite simply that whatever the direct object is of a sentence, this tends to be an affected item. Supporting a candle with a box is not affecting the candle in the ways relevant to human cognition, while tacking it to the wall, or melting it, is. So the phrasing again was misleading. While I'm sure functional fixedness is a real phenomena, I would bet that it isn't even remotely as simple as this particular experiment suggested, and that a wide variety of linguistic techniques can affect how well people are at this. In fact, on the main page for the Candle Problem it's point out that a) using "box and tacks" instead of "box of tacks" in the instructions improves performance, while b) offering a monetary incentive decreases performance. So before you get all hyped up about how you want to think outside the box because my gosh imagine what awesomeness functional fixedness is preventing you from seeing, stop to consider that noone's got any clue what's really going on inside the mind, and you're probably just as likely to screw yourself by trying to manipulate yourself this way as you are to benefit yourself.