Perceived lack of control promotes creativity

Abstract

The sense of lack of control has been shown to foster illusory pattern perception, superstition, conspiracy and religious beliefs. In two identical experiments we investigated whether the feeling of lacking control (vs. control) can also foster creative thinking, which we operationalized as the ability to produce associative and dissociative combinations of either related and unrelated concepts. Participants were asked to think about an incident in their life wherein they felt either to be in control or to lose control of the situation. Immediately afterwards, they had to perform a set of tasks tapping (divergent) creative thinking. In both experiments, we observed higher scores in all creativity tasks for participants who recalled loss-of-control events than for those recalling in-control events. Our findings suggest that compensatory processes, triggered by experiencing lack of control, can promote divergent thinking. We propose an account situated within current models of semantic control.