THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYCreativity
A key aspect of mental prowess and career success that most psychologists
agree isn’t tapped into by traditional intelligence-tests is creativity. Indeed,
in some ways, creativity is the antithesis of intelligence as traditionally
measured, and extremely high scorers on IQ tests tend to do poorly on
creative tasks. Whereas many psychometric tests and school exams require
you to zoom in on the correct answer, drawing on a “convergent” thinking
style, creative tasks ask you to think originally, in a “divergent” style.
Standard measures of a person’s creativity include the “novel uses” test.
To try this out, spend two minutes thinking of as many non-conventional
uses for a paper clip as possible. Then do the same for a brick. A psycholo-
gist would give you a total score for the number of uses you came up with,
as well as scores for the originality and usefulness of your ideas. There’s
also the “Remote Associates Test”. For example, which one word can form
a compound word or two-word phrase with: a) widow; b) bite; c) monkey?
Or another one – which word goes with: a) blood; b) music; c) cheese?
Five tips for boosting your creativity
Do the groundwork There’s an unfortunate cultural myth that says only
a select few people are capable of creativity; that new and brilliant ideas
simply flow from their minds. The truth is that creativity takes hard work
and exhaustive preparation. If you want to innovate in a given field,
you must first master all that has gone before. But don’t become too
narrowly focused: keep an open mind and stay curious. Most important
of all, don’t forget to capture your ideas. Many wonderful insights are
lost because people mistakenly assume they’ll remember an idea.
Spend time living abroad Anecdotal evidence abounds, but it
was only in 2009 that William Maddux and Adam Galinsky provided
scientific evidence that a lengthy foreign sojourn really can set the
creative juices flowing. They found that students who’d spent more
time abroad were more likely to solve Duncker’s candle problem (see
p.199) and more likely to succeed in an awkward negotiation task that
required a creative solution. They also found that students primed
to think about a time they’d lived abroad tended to be better at the
Remote Associates Test (see above).
Paint your walls blue People sat in front of a blue, rather than a red,
computer screen have been shown to generate better quality and
more creative ideas for things to do with a brick. In the same 2009
study, Ravi Mehta and Rui (Juliet) Zhu at the University of British