Don't underestimate the power

Original post:  Aug 17, 2015

Perhaps you may have admired the creative genius of others from afar. You may have harbored secret wishes to dream up the next iPhone or write that novel or solve that nagging problem. Perhaps you thought that creativity is something that you are born with; that you either have it or you don't. This article argues that isn't true.

In "People Underestimate Their Creative Potential", Melissa Dahl lays out a case for the rest of us. She writes:

But people tend to doubt their own ability to stick to the tedious trial-and-error part of creative work, suggests a large new study from Northwestern University,published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across seven experiments involving more than 1,200 participants, psychologists Brian J. Lucas and Loran F. Nordgren found that people underestimated how many creative solutions they could come up with in a given amount of time, suggesting, the researchers argue, that in a real-life situation, they might give up too easily. And that’s a problem, they say, because their results also showed that the participants’ ideas became more creative as they persisted.

The experiments presented a challenge and asked participants for creative ideas. They then stopped the group and asked how many ideas they might come up with in a second brainstorming session. They found:

And not only did they come up with more ideas than they expected, those ideas got better as they kept working, as judged by an independent team of raters. This is consistent with the findings of previous studies on creativity — for example, one 1970s study of classical composers found a link between higher-quality pieces and the total number of compositions that an individual composer had produced. A huge part of creative work, after all, is failure: the terrible, weird ideas that lead the way to the truly great and original ones. The famed psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyitheorized that this helps explain why "flow" leads to those bursts of insight: When people are absorbed by a task, they "persist ... single-mindedly, disregarding hunger, fatigue, and discomfort." Concentrating deeply in one area for an extended period of time allows you to examine the thing from different angles, understanding the nuances of the problem.

By forcing participants to keep trying, the researchers may have helped them unlock more of their potential!

Here is the link to the full article:  People Underestimate Their Creative Potential -- Science of Us