Category: Creativity

A hidden bias that could be causing people to overlook their most creative ideas.

A creativity study reveals that it is often people’s second-best idea that ends up being rated the most creative.

When fleshing out an idea from the initial moment of inspiration, it turns out that the second-best idea is the one that tends to gain wings.

More abstract ideas are also likely to be more creative, the study found, although we naturally tend to overlook abstraction.

Dr Justin M. Berg, the study’s author, said:

“Evaluating creativity is difficult.

A lot of research suggests that people are not very good at it, that a number of biases and challenges get in the way.”

For the study, people were asked to tackle a series of creative challenges, such as designing a way to stop people falling asleep in self-driving cars.

Participants were asked to come up with three initial solutions, which they then ranked best to worst.

Afterwards, each of the ideas was fleshed out before they were shown to a group of experts and consumers to rate creativity.

Dr Berg found a surprisingly consistent pattern:

“People’s most promising initial ideas were consistently ranked second.

People are not terrible at identifying their best initial idea, and they are not terrible in a non-random way, which means they can get better at it.”

Ideas that were more abstract were also more likely to be creative, something that people generally disregarded.

Dr Berg said:

“People value concreteness too much and abstractness too little in their initial ideas.

The best initial ideas likely won’t seem very creative at the beginning—there may not be enough substance to see their potential originality and usefulness.

Their abstractness is a barrier that prevents people from spotting their potential.”

When generating more than three ideas, it is worth looking in the top half of the list, said Dr Berg:

“When you have lots of initial ideas, your most promising idea might not be your second favorite.

Instead, it may be somewhere in the top half of your predicted rankings, below the idea ranked first but above the ideas you think are your worst.

We’re probably all killing a lot of our best ideas early in the creative process without knowing it.”

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The study was published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (Berg, 2019).

Creativity is not the exclusive domain of youth.

There are two peaks for creativity across the lifespan.

One occurs — as you might imagine — in the mid-20s and a second comes later, in the mid-50s.

At least, these are the ages at which people are most likely to do the work that bags them a Nobel Prize.

Professor Bruce Weinberg, the study’s first author, said:

“Many people believe that creativity is exclusively associated with youth, but it really depends on what kind of creativity you’re talking about.”

The conclusions come from an analysis of Nobel Prize winners in Economics over the years, although Professor Weinberg thinks the results apply to creativity generally.

‘Conceptual’ innovators tended to do their best work in their 20s, the results revealed.

Experimentalists, though, were more likely to get the Nobel Prize for work done in their 50s.

Professor Weinberg said:

“Whether you hit your creative peak early or late in your career depends on whether you have a conceptual or experimental approach.”

The probable reason is that being new to a field helps conceptualists, because they are not yet bogged down with accepted views.

Experimentalists, though, need time to accumulate their findings, digging slowly, layer after layer, until they unearth the mother lode.

The same is likely true for other areas of creativity outside the sciences.

Breakthrough ideas are more likely to come from the young, but older people have more time to perfect their art.

Creative peak

Other studies have compared different disciplines to look for creative peaks.

These have generally found that scientific creativity peaks in people’s mid-30s to early 40s.

Professor Weinberg said:

“These studies attribute differences in creative peaks to the nature of the scientific fields themselves, not to the scientists doing the work.

Our research suggests than when you’re most creative is less a product of the scientific field that you’re in and is more about how you approach the work you do.”

The study was published in the journal De Economist (Weinberg & Galenson, 2019).