Most days don’t require a lot of
creativity. You get up and go through
your normal routine. Your school or work
day involves a lot of repetition of tasks like those you have done before. The day may be interesting, but it didn’t
require you to really stretch out beyond your comfort zone.
Sometimes, though, you really
need a novel solution to a difficult problem.
At those times, it would be great to have a way to jump-start the
creative process.
Descriptions of the creative
process often focus on two phases of creativity. In the divergent
phase, many different potential ideas need to be generated. In the convergent phase, those ideas need to be
evaluated to select the ones that are most promising. The divergent phase is particularly
difficult, because it requires going beyond existing ideas in some way.
Research by Malgorzata Goclowska,
Matthijs Baas, Richard Crisp, and Carsten De Dreu described in the August, 2014
issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
suggests that thinking about inconsistent concepts jump-starts divergent
thinking for some people.
These researchers focus on an
individual difference called Need for Structure. The idea is that some people really like
their world to be predictable and to follow rules. Other people are less bothered when things do
not go according to plan. They suggest
that divergent thinking by people who are low in Need for Structure (so that
they are not bothered by surprises) is helped by thinking about surprising
juxtapositions of concepts. People high
in Need for Structure are hurt by thinking about these surprising items.
In one study, participants were
asked to study a series of pictures for a later memory test. One group saw pictures of people in
situations consistent with their costume.
They might see an astronaut in space or an Eskimo on the snow. A second group saw pictures of people in
situations that were inconsistent with their costume (an astronaut in the snow
or an Eskimo in space).
Then, the participants were asked
to generate as many names as they could think of for a new type of pasta. The instructions gave five examples of pasta
names that all ended in an ‘i.’ The
researchers were interested in whether participants would generate pasta names
that ended in different letters and how often they would switch the last
letter, which would suggest that they were trying different methods for
generating names.
The inconsistent pictures had an
interesting influence on participants.
Participants who were low in need for structure tended to generate many
more pasta names that did not end in ‘i’ and to generate names ending in many
different letters compared to those people who were high in need for
structure. Seeing consistent pictures
did not have much influence on participants’ performance regardless of their
need for structure.
A second study demonstrated a
similar finding using the Remote Associates Test, in which participants are
shown three words (MAGIC PLUSH FLOOR) and are asked to find another word that
could go with each of them (in this case, CARPET). In this case, participants generated the
attributes of either a schema-consistent person (a male mechanic) or a
schema-inconsistent person (a female mechanic).
Participants who thought about the schema-inconsistent person generated
more correct answers on the Remote Associates Test if they were low in Need for
Structure than if they were High in Need for Structure.
These results suggest that if you
are trying to jump-start your creativity, you need to know a bit more about
yourself. If you are willing to accept
uncertain situations, then exposing yourself to inconsistent juxtapositions of
concepts may get you thinking divergently.
If you are less willing to accept uncertainty, though, then this
strategy won’t work for you.
