Category: Creativity

Being rejected socially, can give you this outsider advantage.

Being rejected socially makes people more creative.

Feeling outside the group helps people generate more novel ideas.

It may help to explain why so many great artists were outsiders — people who lived separate lives in order to produce works that would surprise and delight the rest of us.

The study’s authors call it the ‘outsider advantage’.

Professor Jack Goncalo, who led the study, said:

“If you have the right way of managing rejection, feeling different can help you reach creative solutions.

Unlike people who have a strong need to belong, some socially rejected people shrug off rejection with an attitude of ‘normal people don’t get me and I am meant for something better.’

Our paper shows how that works.”

For the study, half the participants were told they were not selected for a group and had to do a creativity task on their own.

These people subsequently came up with more novel, unusual solutions to creative problems.

Professor Goncalo said:

“We’re note dismissing the negative consequences rejection has on many individuals, but for some people, the rejection has a golden lining.

For the socially rejected, creativity may be the best revenge.”

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (Kim et al., 2012).

This type of music helps you search longer and harder for a creative solution.

Listening to happy, energetic music increases people’s creativity, a study finds.

Researchers found that listening to the violin concerto “The Four Seasons” by Antonio Vivaldi helped their divergent creativity.

Divergent creativity refers to creating lots of potential answers to a problem.

For example, try to think of as many uses as you can for a brick.

Building a house is the obvious one, but you might also list sitting on it, using it to smash open a coconut, or painting a face on it and using it as a puppet (admittedly not a very expressive puppet!).

The more you can come up with, the more divergent creativity you display.

Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” was compared with, among other pieces, Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for String”, which is a sad and melancholic piece by comparison.

The study’s authors explain their results:

“The main conclusion of the results we obtained is that listening to ‘happy music’ (i.e., classical music that elicits positive mood and is high on arousal), as compared to a silence control condition, is associated with an increase in divergent thinking, but not convergent creativity.”

Convergent creativity is the type where you are trying to reach one specific solution.

Examples of this might include a math problem, a riddle or a crossword.

Here your brain is trying to ‘converge’ on the solution.

Happy classical music had little effect on this type of creativity.

Why, then, does upbeat music have this effect on divergent creativity?

The study’s authors write:

“…creative ideation is a function of persistence and flexibility, and that situational variables can influence creativity either through their effects on persistence, on flexibility, or on both.”

In other words: happy music encourages you to try harder for longer and to search in more places.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Ritter & Ferguson, 2017).