Abstract
The present study examined the effect of distant temporal distance on creative thinking and the underlying motivation mechanism. We tested our hypotheses in four studies. In Studies 1–4, participants in the distant temporal distance opposed to the proximal temporal distance performed better on a series of creative thinking tasks: the Verbal Divergent Thinking Test (Study 1), the Chinese Remote Associates Test (Study 2), the Toy Design Task (Study 3) and the Ad Evaluation Task (Study 4). Moreover, Studies 2 and 3 found that promotion motivation mediated the beneficial effect of distant temporal distance on the performance of the two creative thinking tasks. In conclusion, distant temporal distance facilitated creative thinking, and promotion motivation mediated this beneficial effect.
Highlights
In today’s knowledge-based economy, creativity has been emphasized as a key ability needed to obtain success (Florida, 2002)
Studies 2 and 3 were conducted to provide additional evidence for the results found in Study 1 using two other different types of creative thinking tasks: the Chinese Remote Associates Test (CRAT; Du et al, 2017) and the Toy Design Task (TDT; Moreau and Dahl, 2005), respectively
The result of Study 2 further found that promotion motivation mediated the beneficial effect of distant temporal distance on creative thinking
Summary
In today’s knowledge-based economy, creativity has been emphasized as a key ability needed to obtain success (Florida, 2002). Creativity refers to the ability to produce products that are both novel and useful (Sternberg and Lubart, 1999). Previous studies found that a series of situational factors, such as family and school, played crucial roles in the development of creativity (Pohlman, 1996; Niu and Sternberg, 2003). The current study examined whether an important situational factor – temporal distance – could influence creative thinking. Temporal distance was defined as the extent to which imagined future events or recalled past events deviate from the present in time (Bar-Anan et al, 2006). To gain a better understanding of the effect of temporal distance on creative thinking, the present study intended to examine the underlying motivation mechanism through which temporal distance influenced creative thinking
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