The influence of exposure to randomness on lateral thinking in divergent, convergent, and creative search

Abstract

Exposure to random stimuli has often been suggested to help unlock problem-solving abilities and creativity, helping us to see problems differently and imagine new possibilities. Equally, randomness is widely used in computer science to escape local maxima and find effective solutions to intractable problems. However, randomness has rarely been used as a formal aid in human decision making or investigated in controlled experimental settings. In this pre-registered study, we tested the effect of extraneous random stimuli using Wikipedia's random page generator on 592 British participants' performance across three online tasks: one ‘convergent’ forecasting task and two ‘divergent’ fluency tasks. We found no improvement associated with the treatment and often significant impairment. A Bayesian meta-analysis of the tasks finds strong support for the null hypothesis. We conclude that stimulating lateral thinking through random stimuli is non-trivial and may require such stimuli to be sufficiently task-related or ‘optimally random’.