Jack A. Goncalo

The bias against creativity: why people desire but reject creative ideas.

People often reject creative ideas, even when espousing creativity as a desired goal. To explain this paradox, we propose that people can hold a bias against creativity that is not necessarily overt and that is activated when people experience a motivation to reduce uncertainty. In two experiments, we manipulated uncertainty using different methods, including an uncertainty-reduction prime. The results of both experiments demonstrated the existence of a negative bias against creativity (relative to practicality) when participants experienced uncertainty. Furthermore, this bias against creativity interfered with participants’ ability to recognize a creative idea. These results reveal a concealed barrier that creative actors may face as they attempt to gain acceptance for their novel ideas.

Are Two Narcissists Better Than One? The Link Between Narcissism, Perceived Creativity, and Creative Performance:

The current research examines the link between narcissism and creativity at the individual, relational, and group levels of analysis. It finds that narcissists are not necessarily more creative than others, but they think they are, and they are adept at persuading others to agree with them. In the first study, narcissism was positively associated with self-rated creativity, despite the fact that blind coders saw no difference between the creative products offered by those low and high on narcissism. In a second study, more narcissistic individuals asked to pitch creative ideas to a target person were judged by the targets as being more creative than were less narcissistic individuals, in part because narcissists were more enthusiastic. Finally, a study of group creativity finds evidence of a curvilinear effect: Having more narcissists is better for generating creative outcomes (but having too many provides diminishing returns).

Living Large The Powerful Overestimate Their Own Height

In three experiments, we tested the prediction that individuals’ experience of power influences their perceptions of their own height. High power, relative to low power, was associated with smaller estimates of a pole’s height relative to the self (Experiment 1), with larger estimates of one’s own height (Experiment 2), and with choice of a taller avatar to represent the self in a second-life game (Experiment 3). These results emerged regardless of whether power was experientially primed (Experiments 1 and 3) or manipulated through assigned roles (Experiment 2). Although a great deal of research has shown that more physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that powerful people feel taller than they are. The discussion considers the implications for existing and future research on the physical experience of power.

Embodied Metaphors and Creative “Acts”

Creativity is a highly sought-after skill. Prescriptive advice for inspiring creativity abounds in the form of metaphors: People are encouraged to “think outside the box,” to consider a problem “on one hand, then on the other hand,” and to “put two and two together” to achieve creative breakthroughs. These metaphors suggest a connection between concrete bodily experiences and creative cognition. Inspired by recent advances in the understanding of body-mind linkages in the research on embodied cognition, we explored whether enacting metaphors for creativity enhances creative problem solving. Our findings from five studies revealed that both physical and psychological embodiment of metaphors for creativity promoted convergent thinking and divergent thinking (i.e., fluency, flexibility, or originality) in problem solving. Going beyond prior research, which focused primarily on the kind of embodiment that primes preexisting knowledge, we provide the first evidence that embodiment can also activate cognitive processes that facilitate the generation of new ideas and connections.

Creative collaborations from afar: The benefits of independent authors

The number of times that an article is cited has served as an indicator of both its creativity and impact. In this study, we investigated the relationship between citations and 2 very simple variables-the number of authors and the number of separate locations. Previous research, on balance, would support the notion that an increased number of collaborators would increase the quality of the product, at least to some asymptote. Research on the effect of separate locations is more sparse. Most work favors collaborations at the same locale, given a sharing of perspective and benefits in terms of coordination and motivation. However, research from the minority influence literature documents the stimulating effects of independent and differing views, leading to the conclusion that independent locations would be an asset. Results from an analysis of 6 journals and 5,113 articles over a 10-year period show the benefit of both the number of authors and the number of independent locations. Journals also differed in their citation average, Psychological Review being cited significantly more often than any of the other 5 journals.

Creativity from Constraint? How Political Correctness Influences Creativity in Mixed-Sex Work Groups

As work organizations become increasingly gender diverse, existing theoretical models have failed to explain why such diversity can have a negative impact on idea generation. Using evidence from two group experiments, this paper tests theory on the effects of imposing a political correctness (PC) norm, one that sets clear expectations for how men and women should interact, on reducing interaction uncertainty and boosting creativity in mixed-sex groups. Our research shows that men and women both experience uncertainty when asked to generate ideas as members of a mixed-sex work group: men because they may fear offending the women in the group and women because they may fear having their ideas devalued or rejected. Most group creativity research begins with the assumption that creativity is unleashed by removing normative constraints, but our results show that the PC norm promotes rather than suppresses the free expression of ideas by reducing the uncertainty experienced by both sexes in mixed-sex work groups and signaling that the group is predictable enough to risk sharing more—and more-novel—ideas. Our results demonstrate that the PC norm, which is often maligned as a threat to free speech, may play an important role in promoting gender parity at work by allowing demographically heterogeneous work groups to more freely exchange creative ideas.

Stretching the Moral Gray Zone Positive Affect, Moral Disengagement, and Dishonesty

We propose that positive affect promotes dishonest behavior by providing the cognitive flexibility necessary to reframe and to rationalize dishonest acts. This hypothesis was tested in two studies. The results of Study 1 showed that individuals experiencing positive affect morally disengage to a greater extent than do individuals experiencing neutral affect. Study 2 built on this finding by demonstrating that the ability to morally disengage can lead individuals who experience positive affect to behave dishonestly. Specifically, the results of Study 2 showed that people experiencing positive affect are more likely to steal than individuals experiencing neutral affect, particularly when self-awareness is low. Furthermore, moral disengagement fully mediated this effect. Taken together, the results suggest that positive affect paves the way for the commission of dishonest acts by altering how individuals evaluate the moral implications of their own behavior.

Outside Advantage: Can Social Rejection Fuel Creative Thought?

Eminently creative people working in fields as disparate as physics and literature refer to the experience of social rejection as fuel for creativity. Yet, the evidence of this relationship is anecdotal, and the psychological process that might explain it is as yet unknown. We theorize that the experience of social rejection may indeed stimulate creativity but only for individuals with an independent self-concept. In 3 studies, we show that individuals who hold an independent self-concept performed more creatively after social rejection relative to inclusion. We also show that this boost in creativity is mediated by a differentiation mind-set, or salient feelings of being different from others. Future research might investigate how the self-concept--for example, various cultural orientations-may shape responses to social rejection by mitigating some of the negative consequences of exclusion and potentially even motivating creative exploration.

Early creativity as a constraint on future achievement

Most organizations, particularly those in volatile environments, recognize the need to stimulate creativity in their workforce because new and useful ideas can be highly profitable (Shalley & Perry-Smith, 2001). It is not surprising, then, that employees or teams that manage to develop a highly creative idea are rewarded with greater pay, recognition, and status (Merton, 1968). However, a highly successful creative idea also may lead to frustration, unmet expectations, and failed attempts to replicate success by producing poor imitations of one’s early work. In other words, early creativity may constrain future achievement as people buckle under the weight of their past success. There is abundant evidence that success can stifle creativity from biographies of eminent novelists. For instance, Ralph Ellison never produced another novel after the Invisible Man despite years of broken promises (and book contracts) that never materialized. It would appear that Harper Lee did not even make such an attempt; she retired shortly after writing her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. This decision may have been a rational one on her part because even prolific writers seem to have trouble replicating early career success. For example, there was a 32-year gap between Norman Mailer’s iconic first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), and his next critical and commercial hit, The Executioner’s Song (1980). Furthermore, the constraining effects of creativity are not restricted to writers but may be a consequence of success in many fields. For instance, Art Fry, the scientist who invented the Post-It Note, also has been constrained by early success because all his subsequent inventions, such as the Post-It Flag, are incrementally related to the original Post-It idea. Almost from the inception of research on creativity, there has been a focus on the highly creative individual and an attempt to identify the traits (Helson, 1996) and social contexts (Amabile, 1983a, 1996) that give

Squeezed in the middle: The middle status trade creativity for focus

Classical research on social influence suggested that people are the most conforming in the middle of a status hierarchy as opposed to the top or bottom. Yet this promising line of research was abandoned before the psychological mechanism behind middle-status conformity had been identified. Moving beyond the early focus on conformity, we propose that the threat of status loss may make those with middle status more wary of advancing creative solutions in fear that they will be evaluated negatively. Using different manipulations of status and measures of creativity, we found that when being evaluated, middle-status individuals were less creative than either high-status or low-status individuals (Studies 1 and 2). In addition, we found that anxiety at the prospect of status loss also caused individuals with middle status to narrow their focus of attention and to think more convergently (Study 3). We delineate the consequences of power and status both theoretically and empirically by showing that, unlike status, the relationship between power and creativity is positive and linear (Study 4). By both measuring status (Studies 2 and 3) and by manipulating it directly (Study 5), we demonstrate that the threat of status loss explains the consequences of middle status. Finally, we discuss the theoretical implications of our results for future research on status and problem solving on tasks that require either focus or flexibility.