A hidden bias that could be causing people to overlook their most creative ideas.
A creativity study reveals that it is often people’s second-best idea that ends up being rated the most creative.
When fleshing out an idea from the initial moment of inspiration, it turns out that the second-best idea is the one that tends to gain wings.
More abstract ideas are also likely to be more creative, the study found, although we naturally tend to overlook abstraction.
Dr Justin M. Berg, the study’s author, said:
“Evaluating creativity is difficult.
A lot of research suggests that people are not very good at it, that a number of biases and challenges get in the way.”
For the study, people were asked to tackle a series of creative challenges, such as designing a way to stop people falling asleep in self-driving cars.
Participants were asked to come up with three initial solutions, which they then ranked best to worst.
Afterwards, each of the ideas was fleshed out before they were shown to a group of experts and consumers to rate creativity.
Dr Berg found a surprisingly consistent pattern:
“People’s most promising initial ideas were consistently ranked second.
People are not terrible at identifying their best initial idea, and they are not terrible in a non-random way, which means they can get better at it.”
Ideas that were more abstract were also more likely to be creative, something that people generally disregarded.
Dr Berg said:
“People value concreteness too much and abstractness too little in their initial ideas.
The best initial ideas likely won’t seem very creative at the beginning—there may not be enough substance to see their potential originality and usefulness.
Their abstractness is a barrier that prevents people from spotting their potential.”
When generating more than three ideas, it is worth looking in the top half of the list, said Dr Berg:
“When you have lots of initial ideas, your most promising idea might not be your second favorite.
Instead, it may be somewhere in the top half of your predicted rankings, below the idea ranked first but above the ideas you think are your worst.
We’re probably all killing a lot of our best ideas early in the creative process without knowing it.”
The study was published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (Berg, 2019).
