We value creativity, and are often justifiably proud of our
most creative acts. Solving a difficult
problem at work is a major achievement.
Writing a song or creating a novel work of art is an amazing feat. If you wander the aisles of your local
bookstore, you find lots of books that promise to unleash your inner creative
genius.
So, when a research finding comes along that suggests an
easy way to improve your creativity, you should sit up and listen.
A paper by Evan Polman and Kyle Emich in the April, 2011
issue of Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin provides just this kind of straightforward
demonstration.
One of the factors that often prevents people from doing
something really creative is their existing knowledge. If you are writing a song, it is hard to come
up with something that is very different from what other people have written,
because you are reminded of melodies you have heard before. If you are solving a problem at work, there
is a tendency to focus on solutions that people have used in the past to solve
similar problems.
So, how do you break away from the influence of the past?
Polman and Emich make use of construal level theory. This
theory, developed by Yaacov Trope, Nira Liberman, and their colleagues suggests
that we think about things that are near to us in space or time in specific
terms, but we think about things that are far from us in space or time in more
abstract terms. For example, when thinking
about a trip you might take to Paris next summer, you might focus on how much
fun it would be or how great it would be to sit in a café and watch the world
go by. When thinking about a trip to
Paris you are going to take next week, though, you focus on what you are going
to wear, how you are going to exchange money, and what you will do when you
encounter Parisians who speak no English.
Polman and Emich reason that if you are trying to think
creatively, then generating some distance between you and the problem you are
solving might enhance your creativity.
Indeed, some research by Jens Forster, Ron Friedman, and Nira Liberman
in a 2004 paper in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology suggests this might be true.
To create a sense of psychological distance, Polman and
Emich had people perform a variety of tasks that tap creativity. They either performed these tasks while
thinking about themselves or when thinking about someone else.
In one study, people were asked to draw aliens. Tom Ward has done research on creativity, and
has shown that most people who draw aliens give them lots of properties that
exist in animals on earth. The aliens
people draw often have two eyes and are symmetric so that they have similar
limbs on each side of their bodies. That
is, most people do not draw creative aliens.
They are stuck using their knowledge of animals, even when they are
trying to do something really novel.
In one of Polman and Emich’s studies, people were asked to
draw an alien for a story they would write later, or they were asked to draw an
alien for a story that would be written by someone else. A group of independent raters then looked to
see how many properties the aliens had that are not typical of animals on
earth. The people who drew aliens for
themselves used many fewer novel properties than the people who drew aliens for
someone else to use. That is, people
were less creative when drawing for themselves than when drawing for someone
else.
In another study, people were asked to solve an insight
problem. The problem involves a prisoner
stuck in a tall tower. The prisoner
finds a rope that is half as long as it needs to be to climb out of the tower
and escape. The prisoner divides the
rope in half and ties the two parts together and escapes. How does he do this?
Half of the people were given this problem and were told to
imagine that they were the prisoner. The
other half were told to imagine that someone else was the prisoner. About 2/3 of the people who solved the
problem for someone else got the right answer, while only about 1/2 of the
people who solved the problem for themselves got it right. Again, thinking for someone else made people
more creative.
By the way, the right answer here is to divide the rope
lengthwise, and then tie the ends together and climb to safety.
These results suggest a simple way of helping yourself to be
more creative. When you are in a
situation where you need to escape the curse of your own specific knowledge,
pretend that you are being creative on behalf of someone else. That will help you think about the problem
more abstractly and avoid just repeating the solutions you already know about.