People are biased against creative ideas, studies find

Cornell Chronicle Online ^ | Aug 25, 2011 | Mary Catt

[Kevmo]

People are biased against creative ideas, studies find

Goncalo
By Mary Catt
The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don't even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm .

"How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?" said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people .

The studies' findings include:
Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical -- tried and true.
Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.
For example, subjects had a negative reaction to a running shoe equipped with nanotechnology that adjusted fabric thickness to cool the foot and reduce blisters .

To uncover bias against creativity, the researchers used a subtle technique to measure unconscious bias -- the kind to which people may not want to admit, such as racism. Results revealed that while people explicitly claimed to desire creative ideas, they actually associated creative ideas with negative words such as "vomit," "poison" and "agony."
Goncalo said this bias caused subjects to reject ideas for new products that were novel and high quality .

"Our findings imply a deep irony," wrote the authors, who also included Jennifer Mueller of the University of Pennsylvania and Shimul Melwani of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill .

Uncertainty drives the search for and generation of creative ideas, but "uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most," the researchers wrote. "Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. ... The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity."
The study, "The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas," might validate the frustrations of creative people, Goncalo said .

Mary Catt is assistant director of communications at the ILR School .

[MortMan]

Creativity creates discomfort when the leap of logic required to understand it isn’t bridged by the creative thinker for his audience, IMO. Familiarity breeds comfort.

[ponygirl]

Early 90's.

The thing about a group crit is that if someone has a personal vendetta, it's usually pretty apparent... and the bad side to that is that the person you attack is also going to get a turn at your work, so it's kind of pointless to approach it in that way. At the school I attended, we were told from the very beginning to get over emotional attachments to the work, because at some point you were going to get your feelings hurt. If you couldn't stand up in front of everyone and justify every element in your design, from typeface selection to color to composition to production...you were just asking to get trashed. It's different in an art program, because a lot of times your reasoning for an artistic decision boils down to "I felt like it." That won't usually fly in a design program and the students who had a problem with it were those who either belonged in an art program, or, like someone else here mentioned, had some narcissistic tendencies and just thought their crap was great while others could see it was just crap.

I took this one drawing class taught by a woman who was considered a bit of a hardass. There were all sorts of rumors about how she would tear student work off the wall during a crit and rip it up in front of them. Everyone was terrified of this woman, mostly due to the rumors and stories passed along from former students. But I actually did see her do exactly that in our final project critique. This one guy who skipped class all the time showed up for the final, which was supposed to be 5 complete charcoals. Most people in the class had spent weeks working on their final drawings. This guy showed up and you could tell he sketched this stuff up the night before. (Dude was famous for this sort of thing. He was in another of my classes and on more than one occasion had pinned crap to the wall and then tried to BS his way through it.) When we got to his work, the prof asked everyone for their opinions and people were sort of quiet. No one was willing to say, "I think you spent five minutes on this." (I think one guy said something like, "This seems a little...incomplete...") After people danced around it for a while, she strolled nonchalantly up to the board, tore the guy's work off the wall (not in an angry way, just in a very deliberate way), ripped it all in half, and handed it back to the guy with the words, "You are wasting our time." Then she moved on to the next project, leaving him sitting there with his torn paper, totally stunned. The rest of us were thrilled because we had seen this guy do this more than once, but this was the first professor who had finally given him the treatment he deserved.

[reformedliberal]

We had those sorts of profs back in the day, too, as well as that type of student.

My husband and I did graphic design for several years, pre-computer. You do what the client wants. And it _is_ *work product*, not *art*. The most often heard phrase was “Don’t get too creative.”

Creativity is unsettling. Not what anyone wants associated with their business image. So, you end being subtly creative to satisfy yourself and the client. At some point, if all you are allowed to do is hack work, you find something else.