Impact of a brief ego depletion procedure on creative behaviour in the upper primary classroom

Abstract

In the course of normal classroom lessons, 103 students (median 11.10 years) were asked to spend 15 min writing ‘anything you can think of’ about the number 50 on a blank page. The products were independently scored by 2 specialist art teachers and 2 specialist mathematics teachers on criteria relevant to their specialisations. Immediately before this task, however, half the students (depleted group) worked on difficult matching problems for 3 min, whereas controls worked on facile problems. Although volume of creative response appeared only marginally affected, depleted students were rated as lower on overall creativity (d = .8) by the arts teachers. The mathematics teachers also rated the depleted students as showing less quality in their work (d = .97). The depleted students cited fewer mathematical statements, but displayed more errors in statements they had written. The findings were interpreted in terms of ego depletion effects upon creativity.