Tuesday 1 March 2011

Thinking for others can boost creativity

According to a recent study (Thinking for others can boost creativity) we're more capable of mental novelty when thinking on behalf of strangers than for ourselves.

Across four studies involving hundreds of undergrads, Polman and Emich found that participants drew more original aliens for a story to be written by someone else than for a story they were to write themselves; that participants thought of more original gift ideas for an unknown student completely unrelated to themselves, as opposed to one who they were told shared their same birth month; and that participants were more likely to solve an escape-from-tower problem if they imagined someone else trapped in the tower, rather than themselves (a 66 vs. 48 per cent success rate).