We Have a Creativity Problem

Creativity is seen as the key to great entertainment, innovation, progress and forward- thinking ideas. Who doesn't want to be inventive?

The science of implicit bias shows that what people say about creativity isn't always how they feel about it. A recent study shows that our bias towards creativity can deter us from hiring a creative employee, as we see creativity as noxious and disruptive.

The lead author of the new study said that people have strong associations with the concept of creativity and other negative associations like vomit and poison.

The underlying factors that motivate and hinder creators have been studied by Dr. Goncalo for a decade. He and his co-authors 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 found that innovation is aversive in part because it can intensify feelings of uncertainty.

The study subjects were divided into two groups. A group of people were told that some of them would get a bonus after the study, but that the selection of the recipients would not be based on their performance. There was a sense of uncertainty in the group.

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

Two groups were given a series of tasks to gauge how they felt about creativity. One of the measures looked at the participants' explicitly stated views, and the other looked at their subconscious feelings. What they said about creativity reflected what they actually felt.

implicit bias is what this sort of research gets at. It is the same kind of research that can be used to study how people feel about different races.

The researchers had them fill out a survey about their feelings about certain ideas.

The researchers used an Implicit Association Test to get at the hidden feelings of the subjects. It works by measuring a study subject's reaction time to ideas presented on a screen.

The subjects were presented with the words from the survey that suggested creativity, and their opposites, along with words with positive associations.

The researchers found that the group that had been primed to feel uncertain expressed positive associations with words like practical and useful.

The biases against creativity can be traced to the disruptive nature of novel and original creations. Without certainty of desirable results, creativity means change.

We have an implicit belief that the status quo is safe, according to a professor of management at the University of San Diego. Dr. Muller said that the paper came from watching company managers reject new ideas and professed to want creativity.

The idea goes nowhere if the leaders say we're innovative.

She said that the people invested in the status quo have plenty of incentive not to change.

The researchers noted that people in uncertain circumstances may not be able to accept a creative solution.

Uncertainty spurs the search for and generation of creative ideas, yet our findings show that uncertainty also makes us less able to.

The paper by Dr. Goncalo and his team was published in March and explored whether creativity bias might affect the kind of employees that employers might hire.

Two groups of people were asked to read passages about a hypothetical job candidate named Michael, who was described as highly innovative and entrepreneurial.

Michael had designed a new running shoe for one group of readers. Michael had invented a new sex toy. The story about Michael's creativity was the same as before, except for the specification of the thing he was creating.

The two groups were then asked questions such as "How creative is Michael?" and "How much is Michael a conventional thinker versus an innovative thinker?"

The group that learned that Michael was a novel thinker about sex toys graded him as more creative than the group that learned he was a novel thinker about running shoes.

The researchers looked at whether the study subjects in the two groups actually felt the way they said they did about Michael. The two groups saw him as equally creative.

It suggested that social stigma clouds our perception of creativity.

He said that peer reviewers were not comfortable with the sex toy idea.

This may not have been a surprise. Sex-toy design is a socially stigmatized field and it could feel dangerous to herald the creativity of someone working in it.

The recent research on implicit bias in creativity shows a powerful, larger finding, according to a professor of psychology at Yale.

The researchers say that it speaks volumes 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.

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 fame until after his death.

Plus a change.

Adapted from the book "Inspired: Understanding Creativity". A journey through art, science, and the soul will be published on Tuesday.