Creative in Someone Else's Shoes? The Effects of Perspective Taking and Motivation on Creativity

Abstract

Creativity is difficult to obtain because people are constrained by their own existing knowledge. One seemingly logical solution to this problem might be to shift perspectives by taking another person's point of view. However, in this paper I argue and demonstrate that perspective taking seems to have detrimental rather than beneficial effects on creative idea generation, particularly when the perspective taker is in a cooperative rather than a competitive mindset. Since perspective taking tends to occur in cooperative, rather than competitive, circumstances in naturalistic settings, I conclude that shifting perspectives by taking another person's perspective might be detrimental to creative idea generation.