Abstract
Previous researchers have documented that priming inconsistent stereotypic information boosts creativity. The current study further examined the moderating role of creativity connectivity—which is the degree to which people perceive a social group or professional role to be relevant to creativity—in the priming of information related to the boosting effects of creativity. Study 1 adopted a 2 (stereotypically inconsistent target gender: male vs. female) × 2 [priming types: stereotypically consistent information (SCI) priming vs. stereotypically inconsistent information (SICI) priming] group design in which 89 college students from Wuhan were enrolled to complete a priming paradigm and a poster-advertising-design task. As a result, we found that the activation of inconsistent stereotypic information boosted creativity compared with that of consistent stereotypic information, which replicated previous findings. Study 2 also adopted a 2 (creativity-domain connectivity: high vs. low) × 2 (priming types: SCI priming vs. SICI priming) group design in which 85 college students from Wuhan were enrolled to complete the same tasks as in Study 1. The results of Study 2 indicated that when information with low relevance to creativity such as “a nurse” was primed, creativity was then significantly boosted by inconsistent stereotypic information such as “a male nurse” compared with the stereotypic one such as “a female nurse.” Conversely, when information with high relevance to creativity such as “a poet” was primed, there were no significant creativity-boosting effects between inconsistent stereotypic information such as “a dull poet” and the consistent one such as “an eccentric poet.” In sum, this study (i) replicated the previous findings in Chinese culture and (ii) further explored the moderating role of creativity connectivity of the inconsistent stereotypic information.
Highlights
Creativity, which refers to the ability of individuals to generate novel and useful products (Sternberg, 1999; Gong et al, 2016), is one of the most important topics in the study of psychology
Dumas and Dunbar (2016) used a multi-purpose task to measure the divergentthinking performance of participants and found that both fluency and originality of the divergent thinking of participants in the group primed with low-creativity stereotypes (e.g., “a stubborn librarian”) were lower than that of participants primed with high-creativity stereotypes (e.g., “an eccentric poet”); that is, the effect of primed stereotypic information on creativity was based on the connectivity between stereotypic content and creativity
Post hoc multiple comparisons of the one-way ANOVA showed that the mean scores of the two targets in the stereotypically inconsistent information (SICI) priming group (M = 5.55, 3.95) were both significantly greater than those of the two targets in the stereotypically consistent information (SCI) priming group (M = 2.35, 2.08; p < 0.001 for both), which indicated that participants in the SICI group thought the targets were more counter-stereotypic than those in SCI group
Summary
Creativity, which refers to the ability of individuals to generate novel and useful products (Sternberg, 1999; Gong et al, 2016), is one of the most important topics in the study of psychology. The results of this study showed that the experimental group performed better than the control group in a subsequent divergent-thinking task On this basis, Dumas and Dunbar (2016) used a multi-purpose task to measure the divergentthinking performance of participants and found that both fluency and originality of the divergent thinking of participants in the group primed with low-creativity stereotypes (e.g., “a stubborn librarian”) were lower than that of participants primed with high-creativity stereotypes (e.g., “an eccentric poet”); that is, the effect of primed stereotypic information on creativity was based on the connectivity between stereotypic content and creativity. Later, de Rooij et al (2017) attempted to manipulate the relationship between the participants’ network avatars and their corresponding creativity in a 3D virtual environment They asked the participants to imagine themselves as the avatar and to generate creative examples of objects characterized by a particular feature, which was used to measure participants’ creativity. It can be seen that the creative connectivity of priming information—that is, the degree of association between social groups/professional roles and the perceived creativity of these groups/roles—plays an extremely important moderating role in how stereotypes affect creativity
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