Study finds bias against creativity

Well, this doesn’t bode well..

There is little doubt that increasingly rapid technological and social change is increasing pressure to come up with creative solutions to the issues we face. But, a group of researchers are reporting that they have identified a somewhat surprising hurdle: that people are generally biased against creative ideas even when they claim to be open to them. The researchers conducted an experiment where they manipulated feelings of uncertainty to measure subjects’ attitudes toward creative vs. purely practical ideas. They found that the subjects were biased against creative ideas, and furthermore, that their bias often impaired their ability to identify creative ideas as such.

There’s one thing that I find somewhat questionable in this research. I’m not entirely convinced that the researchers measured subjects’ attitudes toward creativity rather than their general apprehension about uncertainty. The two don’t necessarily go hand in hand. We can have a very creative idea that is put forth in a manner that minimizes uncertainty. However, often when we are in a creative phase of problem solving, we put off addressing the uncertainty factors so as not to be bogged down by them.

Nevertheless, the results reported in the paper do make an interesting point – that selling a creative idea can be more work than we might expect.