Facilitating creative thinking in the classroom: Investigating the effects of plants and the colour green on visual and verbal creativity

Abstract

We report upon a study concerned with the effect of exposure to live plants, views to nature and the colour green upon visual and verbal creativity. The study reported in this paper was undertaken with 108 business students at a British University who were randomly allocated to one of the three conditions. The control group were placed in a classroom with no plants present and blinds drawn to block view to natural settings, the first experimental group were placed in a classroom with no plants present, blinds drawn to block views to nature but completed the creativity tasks on green paper. The second experimental group were placed in the same room as the other groups, but were surrounded by live plants and had views to nature through the large classroom windows. All participants completed two creativity tasks; a visual creativity task and a verbal creativity task. Visual creativity was assessed using a modified version of Amabile's Consensual Assessment Technique (Amabile, 1982). Verbal creative was assessed using a modified scoring method of Guilford's alternative uses task developed by Silvia et al. (2008). Findings indicate that access to natural views, plants and the colour green increase visual creativity, but have no impact on verbal creativity in classroom settings. The results suggest that creativity is domain specific and any practical measures taken to enhance creativity need to be aligned with the target domain.