The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas

What I read

In this paper, the authors describe two experiments they conducted to see if people say they want a creative idea but also associate that idea with negative ideas. They conclude that people do associate creativity with negative sentiment, perhaps because creativity is associated with uncertainty.

First, the authors propose the intent of their research – to understand why, while research indicates people say they desire creative ideas, research also shows that those ideas have been rejected in a number of contexts. Their work will show that people hold a bias against creativity. They reference existing definitions of creativity as ideas that are both novel and useful. These include:

Creativity is the engine of scientific discovery

Creativity is the fundamental driving force of positive change

Creativity is associated with intelligence, wisdom, and moral goodness

Prior studies have shown that it’s difficult for people to view novelty and practicality as associated, for several reasons. Novelty holds uncertainty, may lead to failure, may lead to social rejection; it is hard to predict time to completion; and it can feel bad. But negative sentiment, related to these ideas, is “insidious,” and may lead to negative social repercussions.

The authors then describe how they will work to “assess explicit attitudes in addition to implicit attitudes which are less susceptible to self-presentation biases and normative pressures.” This is at the heart of this paper – if “uncertainty… promotes a great bias against creativity” and if this bias “deters people’s ability to recognize creative ideas.”

They then describe their experimental method. In one experiment, some participants were uncertain if they would receive money for participating, while some were aware they would not be offered money (no uncertainty). Both sets were shown pairs of words, one good and one bad, and the speed at which they selected a pair was measured. It’s unclear what their instructions were on which to pick. They concluded that people are ambivalent about creativity: “While participants in the baseline condition evidenced positive implicit associations with creativity relative to practicality, participants in the uncertainty condition exhibited an implicit bias against creativity relative to practicality.”

In the second experiment, participants were randomly assigned to two groups, and asked to write an essay supporting one of two statements—“For every problem, this is more than one correct solution,” or “For every problem, there is only one correct solution.” They then engaged with the same pairing activity above, and then were asked to rate a creative idea as being highly creative, novel, and practical. They found that the second experiment confirms the first finding—"uncertainty promotes negative associations with creativity relative to practicality—and adds a second, that “the bias against creativity interfered with participants’ ability to recognize a creative idea.”

The authors then describe the implications of their findings. The general result from the work is that “regardless of how open minded people are, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty, or feel uncertain generally, this may bring negative associations with creativity to mind which result in lower evaluations of a creative idea.” The implication of this is that a) even if companies state they want creative ideas, they may not desire or recognize them, and b) the field of creativity researchers should move from learning how to encourage companies to generate more creative ideas to helping them recognize and accept creative ideas.

What I learned and what I think

I really valued the opening of this paper, which was a critical analysis of previous creativity research, and the discussion, which continued that analysis and added their findings. Specifically, in a very approachable and thorough manner, the authors make a case for the confusing relationship between wanting creativity, and rejecting creativity. The case is made methodically, with a compelling narrative, and with each assertion in the narrative supported by prior research.

While this approach is theoretically formulaic, it hasn’t been the case in other of the recent papers I’ve been reading. These other papers have tended to present winding paths towards a point (or not), citing things here and there, and seemed to be trying to assert knowledge through complexity. This paper shows knowledge through simplicity.

This argument moved through these points:

That is a strong way of presenting and integrating generalized and situated cultural phenomenon, and explaining rationally why these things occur.

But; I’m back to my increasingly negative feelings towards the positivist approach being used to study these things, and the need for academia to prove things as compared to explore things. I have to believe that, at some point, my response and criticism is entirely on me and not “the system” because the whole foundation of most of this behavioral research is grounded in the idea that we can scientifically study, through very small and isolated experiments, the relationship between attitudes and behavior, and can draw confident statements about humans at large.

I want to know why people desire and reject creative ideas, which is the title of the paper, because I believe, inductively and through 25 years of fighting against it, that it’s true. And I can offer a number of reasons that I’m extraordinarily confident are correct in some cases, and all of the cases are so highly contextual that seeking some form of generalized principle is just not valuable; and basing that generalized principle on a statistically significant experiment with 80 students just doesn’t pass a reasonable sniff test. The uncertainty a student faces in that they may or may not receive money for participating in an experiment is so obviously not even similar in any way at all to the uncertainty faced by a product manager at Apple launching some shiny new gadget or at Joe’s Stupid Saas Startup launching some new feature in their dumb AI tool. It’s just nuts to me that these very, very, very smart people believe that, and believe that this way of studying it is a good idea.

I know that in the next five years I’m going to need to cite research to support my points, and I don’t know what I’m going to do when I need to cite papers like this, which are cited by 1000 people and academically considered strong representations of ideas, and is well written and well structured, and that I just don’t believe is practically accurate.

On a side note, I don’t understand the experimental method; I feel like they missed a few explanatory steps, like describing the instructions given to the students. I will ask the authors. And, I don’t understand the relationship between writing an assigned essay and judging feelings about creativity. If the writing assignment was randomly assigned, why would we believe that the student who wrote it holds the variable sentiment about creativity?

Anyway; I appreciate the subject matter and will continue pursuing the topic and focus, and continue to ponder how I can be so negative about method and approach.