We Have a Creativity Problem

 

"Creativity is lauded as vital, and seen as the lifeblood of great entertainment, innovation, progress and forward-thinking ideas. Who doesn’t want to be creative or to hire inventive employees?

But the emerging science of implicit bias has revealed that what people say about creativity isn’t necessarily how they feel about it. Research has found that we actually harbor an aversion to creators and creativity; subconsciously, we see creativity as noxious and disruptive, and as a recent study demonstrated, this bias can potentially discourage us from undertaking an innovative project or hiring a creative employee.

“People actually have strong associations between the concept of creativity and other negative associations like vomit and poison,” said Jack Goncalo, a business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the lead author on the new study. “Agony was another one.”

Dr. Goncalo has spent a decade studying the underlying factors that motivate and hinder creators. For instance, he and his co-authors have found that in some cases religious belief can limit a person’s creativity, and that creativity can provide a feeling of liberation to people who carry secrets.

He has also explored people’s subconscious views of creativity, and found that innovation is aversive in part because it can intensify feelings of uncertainty.

In one early study, published in 2012, Dr. Goncalo divided study subjects into two groups. Members of one group were told that some among them would receive a bonus after the study, but that the selection of the recipients would be made by random lottery and would not be based on their performance. Naturally, this introduced a sense of uncertainty into the group.

The other group, the control, was not offered the possibility of a bonus, which eliminated the condition of uncertainty.

The researchers then gave these two groups a series of tasks designed to gauge how they felt about creativity. Two measures were employed; one examined the participants’ explicitly stated views, and a second looked at their subconscious feelings. Did what they stated about creativity reflect what they actually felt?

This sort of research gets at what is known as implicit bias. It’s the same kind of research, broadly speaking, that can be used to study how people feel about those of different races.

To explore the subjects’ explicit views, the researchers had them fill out a survey rating their feelings about ideas that were considered “novel,” “inventive” and “original.” The subjects expressed positive associations with these words.

To get at the subjects’ more hidden feelings, the researchers used a clever computer program known as an Implicit Association Test. It works by measuring a study subject’s reaction time to pairs of ideas presented on a screen.

For instance, the subjects were presented with the words from the survey that suggested creativity, and their opposites (“practical,” “useful”), alongside words with positive associations (“sunshine,” “laughter,” “heaven,” “peace”) and negative associations (“poison,” “agony,” “hell,” “vomit”).

This time the researchers found a significant difference in the results: Both groups expressed positive associations with words like “practical” and “useful,” but the group that had been primed to feel uncertain (because members were unsure whether they would receive a bonus) expressed more negative associations with words suggesting creativity.

The reasons for this implicit bias against creativity can be traced to the fundamentally disruptive nature of novel and original creations. Creativity means change, without the certainty of desirable results.

“We have an implicit belief the status quo is safe,” said Jennifer Mueller, a professor of management at the University of San Diego and a lead author on the 2012 paper about bias against creativity. Dr. Mueller, an expert in creativity science, said that paper arose partly from watching how company managers professed to want creativity and then reflexively rejected new ideas.

“Leaders will say, ‘We’re innovative,’ and employees say, ‘Here’s an idea,’ and the idea goes nowhere,” Dr. Mueller said. “Then employees are angry.”

But, she said, the people invested in the status quo have plenty of incentive not to change. “Novel ideas have almost no upside for a middle manager — almost none,” she said. “The goal of a middle manager is meeting metrics of an existing paradigm.”

That creates another conundrum, the researchers noted, because people in uncertain circumstances may really need a creative solution and yet have trouble accepting it.

“Our findings imply a deep irony,” the authors noted in the 2012 paper. “Prior research shows that uncertainty spurs the search for and generation of creative ideas, yet our findings reveal that uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most.”

The more recent paper by Dr. Goncalo and a different team, published in March, explored whether creativity bias might affect the kind of employees that employers might hire.

This time, they asked two groups of subjects to read passages about a hypothetical job candidate named Michael, who was described as highly innovative and entrepreneurial.

For one group of readers, Michael had applied his creative instincts and abilities to designing a new running shoe. For the others, Michael had applied his creativity to inventing a new sex toy. The two versions of the story about Michael’s creativity were identical except for the specification of the thing he was creating.

The two groups were then prompted to answer questions like “How creative is Michael?” and “How much is Michael a conventional thinker versus an innovative thinker?”

Here, there was a divergence in the responses of the two study groups: The one that learned Michael was a novel thinker about running shoes graded him as more creative than the group that learned he was a novel thinker about sex toys.

Then, using a test to measure implicit bias — as in the prior study — the researchers looked at whether the study subjects in the two groups actually felt the way they said they had about Michael. On the subconscious level, the two groups saw him as equally creative.

To the researchers, it suggested that social stigma clouds our perceptions of creativity. “It’s not fair that the inventor of the shoe gets explicitly endorsed as creative and the inventor of the sex toy doesn’t,” Dr. Goncalo said.

He said he noticed that discomfort with the sex-toy idea showed up among peer reviewers, too. “Even our reviewers said, ‘The experiment is great,’ but they never typed the ‘sex toy,’” Dr. Goncalo said.

This may not be such a surprise. After all, it could feel dangerous to herald the creativity of someone working in a socially stigmatized field like sex-toy design.

Melissa Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Yale and an author of the recent study, said the emerging research on implicit bias in creativity was revealing a powerful, larger finding. “Peoples’ judgments are not captured only by what they say they think,” she said.

In the end, it also speaks volumes, the researchers say, about who among us gets to be celebrated as creative, and whose work is too stigmatized in its own time to be recognized as a creative contribution.

For instance, the study notes that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who painted prostitutes and drug addicts in the late 19th century, was “embraced in the cabaret scene in Paris but did not achieve widespread acclaim until after his death.”

Plus ça change.

Adapted from “Inspired: Understanding Creativity. A Journey Through Art, Science, and the Soul,” to be published on Tuesday by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers."

Creativity must therefore be funded by separate structures, such as the Pentagon funding Silicon Valley or venture capital funding for start-ups. It is naive to expect our stagnant universities or stagnant companies to give us the innovation we need.