Why Do Ideas Get More Creative Across Time? An Executive Interpretation of the Serial Order Effect in Divergent Thinking Tasks

What I read

In this article, the authors offer evidence that creativity is not based on spreading activation (which has been a prevailing theory,) but instead is driven by executive function.

First, the authors reference the long history of creativity research, primarily the work from Christensen and Guilford. A main and recurring output of the research is that ideas tend to become more creative as time passes. This is the “serial order effect” and has been continually reinforced. Researchers have broadly agreed that spreading activation is responsible for this effect, because “better” ideas are poorly linked to more active ideas, so it takes longer to “get there.”

The authors explain the serial order effect in more detail, first by revisiting in more detail the various studies that have confirmed the effect. They indicate that “hindsight and statistical advances” can better show how these studies may have been challenged in their methodologies. One challenge is the way responses were chunked, using median splits; this approach has been more recently described as having “perils.” Additionally, the authors indicate that there is a variation in fluency amongst participants, and in past studies, participants were excluded from the results based on a small set of responses.

They then expand on the idea of spreading activation as a reasonable way of thinking about divergent thinking, where it’s acknowledged that time is necessary to activate “distal associates on the fringe of the network” and therefore creative thinking is either divergent, or convergent. These are executive and controlled aspects of creative thought, where idea generation and refinement strategies are purposefully selected by the person “being creative.” These also take time, and so this may be a plausible alternative theory for why creativity takes time.

Three executive approaches are described that might be occurring. One is the use of different strategies for ideation. Another is attending to categories and actively switching them. A third is managing interference (such as ignoring obvious responses or things that have been previously identified.) Each of these does not require or use spreading activation, and each would explain why creative solutions emerge over time. The authors describe their mechanism for measuring the impact of executive function, by looking at the role of “fluid intelligence,” which is made up of similar executive functions. They selected six accepted tests of fluid intelligence to use in their study, which they then describe in detail. Participants in the study were given ten minutes to come up with as many different ideas as possible. They were told to “be creative” and to “come up with something clever, humorous, original, compelling, or interesting.” They then completed the six fluid intelligence tests. The ideas were scored, and relationships between the idea data and the intelligence data were identified using a variety of accepted statistical methods and models.

They identified significant relationships between fluid intelligence and the “serial order effect”—more intelligent people’s ideas depended less on time, while less intelligent people’s ideas became more creative with time. This doesn’t disprove the serial order effect, but it proposes a change in thinking about why the effect exists. Executive processes take time to occur too. This was evident through analysis focused on the relationship between the serial order and intelligence, and the “serial order effect diminished as intelligence increased, and it was effectively absent at the highest levels of intelligence in our sample.” This implies that “people higher in fluid intelligence started with better ideas and did better throughout the task—their initial ideas were as good as their later ones.” It also challenges the idea that good ideas are “farther away” and need to be activated by spreading activation; instead, they can be generated immediately.

Next, the authors consider reasons for the effect they observed. One strong potential reason is that an executive-order blocking is occurring to inhibit obvious ideas. They aren’t sifting through the ideas faster, because their first answers would be delayed. They also indicate that “strategy use and goal maintenance” are likely at play. The first is that a participant can purposefully employ different ideation approaches. The next is that participants are able to keep the goal in mind, in order to continually compare what they are doing to that.

Finally, the authors reference what they do feel is appropriate to attribute to spreading activation as it interacts with executive control. Passive associative “cueing” is likely used purposefully as a strategy. Associative combination and dissociative abilities are used, which require “higher-order thought.” And, “honing theory” is likely present, where “knowledge systems themselves can self-organize and interact according to dynamic rules.”

What I learned and what I think

The world of executive processes seems to have evolved a great deal since I studied cognitive psychology 25 years ago. The nuance that is referenced is new to me, and welcome. For example, I don’t remember learning anything about blocking and inhibiting, strategy use, goal maintenance, associative combination, interference management, and so-on; they were implied, but I don’t think they had names and all that the names imply about our understanding of how they work.

As with most of these papers, I’m trying to analyze them both through a critical view of the method and results, and also compared to my own experiences, inductively. The use of executive processes to moderate ideation makes sense to me, because it’s fundamental to design as a profession; there just isn’t a whole lot of time to work through obvious answers in order to get to magical ones, if the goal is just that (magical ideas instead of obvious ones.) This means that, while the mandate to “be creative!” is ridiculous both in the concept of the experiment and in real-life, it’s a reality of design as a business.

Additionally, other realities of a design studio and modern work, such as frequent interruptions and “multitasking,” means that executive control over goal maintenance is huge. Selection of strategy in the context of problem solving is also clearly at play in my own work and the work of other designers, because during the process of working through a problem, all sorts of approaches can be used, and there are only heuristics about which to select, when (but, is it autotelic then, with no oversite and only motor/perception? How can it be motor/perceptual only, if we aren’t drawing furniture or toasters?)

But, I’m back to a few of the criticisms I had over the earlier papers, which the more I reflect on it, the more I realize is a clear delineation between creativity at work (in design, specifically) and creativity as popularly described, and therefore as defined in creativity research.

Creativity is not (just) about coming up with new ideas, or, as in this experiment, about coming up with “something clever, humorous, original, compelling, or interesting.”

First, at issue is “coming up with.” The work we did with eClinical required making it easier for power users to filter massive data sets, store those filters, and re-use them across studies through various “cuts” in data. The filtering system existed; it was hard to use. We fixed it. We didn’t “come up with” a solution, as if it was a tinkering process. We analyzed the problem, observed people using the difficult filters, considered parallel approaches and competitive solutions, considered the nature of the existing pattern and interaction language, reflected on and discussed internal perspectives on complexity and how complex an interaction can be for power users, and over this whole time, and through sketching, and critique, and reflection, we solved the problem. Accountants don’t “come up with” ways to file taxes. Functional ceramicists don’t “come up with” ways to throw a pot. They practice.

Also at issue is the bizzare and so consistent view that creativity is first about having lots of ideas and second about having crazy wacky off the wall original ideas. It can be these things. It almost never is. We train people in this form of divergent thinking all the time, because it’s fun, and because it’s a new way for people to look at problems and culture—that they can be addressed through newness, and it’s ok to think about things in different ways than are commonly accepted at an organization. But it’s such a tiny and increasingly insignificant part of design as practiced. As a definition, it leaves no room for appropriateness, business context, implementation, and the realities of conservative business environments. It took years for banks to embrace online check depositing, and sticking it in an app isn’t wacky crazy off the wall, but you know it was a process of painful creativity for the design team. Same with online bill payment, thin and light computers, emojis in text messages… these stupid but real and highly useful “innovations” didn’t just pop out of a brainstorm session.

It's not as if this changes the results of the study, but it changes the implications of the study, and all the other ones. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for application of this in design contexts with academic confidence. I would like to know, cognitively, what is happening to myself and my designers when they solve problems. It’s reasonable that this is it, but it’s also quite possible that it isn’t. So, where are the studies like this, but with a materially different understanding and framing of what defines creativity?