Creativity And Speed Of Mental Processing

What I read

In this article, the authors conduct an experiment to understand if there is a relationship between creativity and speed, related to the ambiguity of a given task. They found that creative people are faster in solving unambiguous tasks, and slower in solving ambiguous tasks.

First, the authors reference the primary theories that they will focus on (and ultimately disprove), which come from Eysenck’s book Genius: The natural history of creativity. The book discussed and proposed theories related to the relationships between creativity and schizophrenia and cognitive disinhibition. One of the assumptions in the theory is that people with schizophrenia, and people who exhibit negative behavior (as defined by psychoticism), have a breakdown of the ability to selectively manage and inhibit attention. As Eysenck proposes a relationship between creativity and schizophrenia, there is a hypothesized similarity—that people who are creative also have a breakdown of the ability to selectively manage and inhibit attention. The researchers hypothesize that “the more creative one is, the faster his/her reaction times will be on unambiguous cognitive tasks.”

The authors describe their research study, which included undergraduate students performing a variety of tests. First, their creativity was measured with three tasks, including the Alternative Uses Task, the Remote Associates Test, and the Adjective Checklist. Students were also measured on a psychoticism scale, which included measures for extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism, and lying. Then, participants engaged in a variety of computer-based tests that focused on the Stroop effect in order to introduce negative priming, as well as on the Concept Verification Test (which measures the relationship between intelligence and reaction time, as a function of complexity.) Again, students engaged with a computer-based presentation of different items and responded based on instructions.

The results of the study are then presented. On the priming task, they found that "the more creative the participant, the slower the reaction time," but there was no significant relationship between negative priming and the Eysenck scales. On the concept verification test, the researchers found no relationship between reaction time and the Eysenck scales. They conclude that there is an association between creativity and cognitive disinhibition, and a significant correlation between reaction time and creativity: that it “suggests profound differences in the cognitive processing involved in creativity and intelligence. Intelligence interacts with task complexity, but creativity does not.” They also found no significant correlation between creativity and psychoticism, which runs counter to Eysenck’s theories. The Concept Verification Test indicated that “creative participants were particularly fast in understanding the complex rules.”

Ultimately, the researchers conclude that there is no mediating relationship between cognitive disinhibition and creativity: “it would seem that real-life creativity is probably influenced by speed of mental processing, cognitive disinhibition, psychoticism, and potential creativity independently. Contrary to Eysenck’s assertions, none of these factors causes another. Rather, they are independent factors, all of which are necessary to produce real-life creativity.”

What I learned and what I think

I did not realize that when this was published in 1999, researchers were still interested in establishing a causal relationship between schizophrenia and creativity (in either direction). This reinforces the idea that a pursuit of creativity is rife with angst and anger, and the other attributes of psychoticism (aggression, impulsivity, and antisocial behavior), and that would definitely reinforce the ideas of “you are creative and I am not,” and “creative people” are somehow in a different social space (better, worse, whatever) than everyone else.

I’m trying to contextualize this in my own history; I would have been just finishing my undergrad, and if this was the backdrop of creativity research, it would have been colliding directly with the dot-com explosion and implosion. I’m not sure how this played out in comparing these “crazy dot com people” with the conservative nature of traditional business. It probably had no impact, since the business community and the psych research community overlapped in 0 ways then (maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think pop-psych existed then? Yes, I’m totally wrong; Malcolm Gladwell’s stuff started appearing in 2000.)

It's fascinating to me to see how things like the Stroop effect are used as mechanisms for studying other things. I never would have thought to use a test like that to study something like this. I wonder if over time, just like in design, you learn a pattern-language of different approaches that you can pull out of a toolbox and throw at a problem, and I wonder if there’s the same conflict in the cog-psych field around using these things.

I’m trying so hard not to critique the method, in the spirit of I can’t possibly be right and the entire community of cognitive psychology is wrong, so I’ll ignore the fact that the results are based on the stupid brick test again. One of the main results, as I understand it, is that creative people are slower on reacting, but faster on understanding complexity. If I play that out behaviorally, it would be that creative people more quickly analyze, break down, consider, compare, frame, and reframe a situation than those who aren’t creative, and then they reflect on it and act more slowly than those who aren’t creative. If we’re going with creativity as lateral thinking, I’m not sure I see that play out. When throwing out wackycrazyness, it appears to work at least halfway the otherway—that speed of execution and action is faster. Maybe I’m misreading the study, but I don’t think so.

I wonder about my weird intrigue with these types of studies. I don’t appreciate the method in so many different ways, and I never really believe the results, but I love reading them. Maybe it’s because I really want to understand what actually is happening cognitively when people solve design problems, and these are at least trying to get there. I think Martindale in specific is well-recognized in this space, and maybe I will try some more of these.

But man, that brick test.