Creativity and Cognitive Skills among Millennials: Thinking Too Much and Creating Too Little.

Brice Corgnet,Roberto Hernán-González,Antonio M Espín

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01626

Abstract

Organizations crucially need the creative talent of millennials but are reluctant to hire them because of their supposed lack of diligence. Recent studies have shown that hiring diligent millennials requires selecting those who score high on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) and thus rely on effortful thinking rather than intuition. A central question is to assess whether the push for recruiting diligent millennials using criteria such as cognitive reflection can ultimately hamper the recruitment of creative workers. To answer this question, we study the relationship between millennials' creativity and their performance on fluid intelligence (Raven) and cognitive reflection (CRT) tests. The good news for recruiters is that we report, in line with previous research, evidence of a positive relationship of fluid intelligence, and to a lesser extent cognitive reflection, with convergent creative thinking. In addition, we observe a positive effect of fluid intelligence on originality and elaboration measures of divergent creative thinking. The bad news for recruiters is the inverted U-shape relationship between cognitive reflection and fluency and flexibility measures of divergent creative thinking. This suggests that thinking too much may hinder important dimensions of creative thinking. Diligent and creative workers may thus be a rare find.

Highlights

Evidence from a recent survey reports that managers are three times more likely to hire a mature worker than to hire a millennial despite desperately needing their creative talent1
Similar arguments arise in recent accounts of the “mad genius hypothesis”: moderate levels of inhibitory or top-down control dysfunction, characteristic of subclinical psychiatric populations, can spur creativity under some conditions whereas clinical-severe levels typically lead to impoverished creative thinking (Schuldberg, 2005; Abraham et al, 2007; Jaracz et al, 2012; Acar and Sen, 2013; Abraham, 2014)
The different measures of divergent thinking (AUT) are significantly correlated, except for originality and flexibility (p = 0.28). We find that both Raven (p < 0.01) and Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) scores (p = 0.03) are positively correlated with convergent thinking (RAT)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Evidence from a recent survey reports that managers are three times more likely to hire a mature worker than to hire a millennial (born between 1980 and 2000; Rainer and Rainer, 2011) despite desperately needing their creative talent. Following a dual-process approach, Barr et al (2015) find experimental evidence of an important effect of controlled Type 2 analytic processes on both convergent and divergent (Guilford, 1967) creative thinking They find that both cognitive ability (measured as the combination of numeracy and verbal skills) and reflective cognitive style (average of scores in the CRT and base-rate problem tasks) covary positively with one’s capacity to make remote associations, that is, with convergent creative thinking. Similar arguments arise in recent accounts of the “mad genius hypothesis”: moderate levels of inhibitory or top-down control dysfunction, characteristic of subclinical psychiatric populations (e.g., mild ADHD and schizophrenia disorders), can spur creativity under some conditions whereas clinical-severe levels typically lead to impoverished creative thinking (Schuldberg, 2005; Abraham et al, 2007; Jaracz et al, 2012; Acar and Sen, 2013; Abraham, 2014)

Participants and General Protocol

RESULTS

DISCUSSION