Category: Creativity

Darwin and Wallace came up with the theory of natural selection at the same time. Why?

New technologies and ideas emerge from our collected brains — not individual geniuses, research finds.

Innovations emerge, the paper argues, by small improvements, the mixing of ideas, situations and pure luck.

While Darwin, Newton and the rest were clearly talented and driven individuals, they were “standing on the shoulders of giants”.

The best thing you can do to be more creative, one of the paper’s authors argues, is to talk to people who disagree with you.

Dr Michael Muthukrishna, the study’s lead author, said:

“The processes of cumulative cultural evolution allow technologies and techniques to emerge, which no single individual could create on their own – because human brains, in isolation, aren’t actually all that smart.

We can see this process at work when two people have the same apparently innovative idea at the same time – such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace with the theory of natural selection.

Rather than being heroic geniuses, Darwin and Wallace were in the same ‘cultural milieu’, both reading the same books and both travelling to biologically diverse island environments.”

Societal innovation is affected by three factors, the researchers found:

• Larger more interconnected societies where ideas can mix.
• Easy transmission of useful knowledge between people so that it can be built upon.
• Tolerance for deviation: trying new things is hard and the rate of failure is high. This has to be allowed for.

Dr Muthukrishna said:

“To be an innovator, it’s better to be social rather than smart.

There’s no doubt that there are variations in people’s raw skills, but what predicts the difference between a Steve Jobs and a Joe Bloggs is actually their exposure to new ideas that are wonderful and different.

If you want to be more creative the best thing you can do is to talk to people who disagree with you.”

The study was published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Muthukrishna & Henrich, 2016).

How to take the ‘road less travelled’.

Incentives can help people be more creative, if they are followed by time to think, research finds.

An ‘incubation period’ is key to producing the most creative results.

In fact, when people are incentivised to be creative they do not come up with more ideas straight away.

Stepping away from the problem for a period — even 20 minutes is enough — allows people to produce more creative solutions.

Together, incentives plus a rest period produce more creative results, the study found.

Professor Steven Kachelmeier, the study’s first author, said:

“Creativity is not instantaneous, but if incentives promote enough ideas as seeds for thought, creativity eventually emerges.”

For the study, one group of participants were paid based on the number of ideas they came up with, another group were given a fixed sum.

When given a creativity test straight away there was no difference in the number of ideas they came up with

However, they returned 10 days later to try the creativity task again.

The results showed that people who were paid based on how many ideas they came up with were more creative when they returned.

A further study showed that a 20-minute walk was enough of a gape to boost the creativity of people who were already incentivised.

Professor Kachelmeier said:

“You need to rest, take a break and detach yourself — even if that detachment is just 20 minutes.

The recipe for creativity is try — and get frustrated because it’s not going to happen.

Relax, sit back, and then it happens.”

Incentives appear to encourage people to come up with ideas that are more divergent.

In other words, despite initially coming up with roughly the same number of ideas, the ideas themselves were more different from each other.

The study was published in the Accounting Review (Kachelmeier et al., 2019).