In psychology, a set is a group of expectations that shape experience by making people especially sensitive to specific kinds of information.
An effect of these factors is that people are particularly sensitive to perceive certain things, detecting them from weaker stimuli than otherwise.
[7] For instance, a person's experience of the events in a sports match can be biased if they strongly support one of the teams.
[3] Mental sets are subconscious tendencies to approach a problem in a particular way,[6] either helping or interfering in the discovery of a solution.
[6] For example, when people are asked, "When a United States plane carrying Canadian passengers crashes in international waters, where should the survivors be buried?"
[6] A specific form of mental set is functional fixedness, in which someone fails to see the variety of uses to which an object can be put.