A Simple Trick to Boost Your Creativity

We value creativity and are often justifiably proud of our most creative acts. Solving a difficult problem at work is a major achievement. Writing a song or creating a novel work of art is an amazing feat. If you wander the aisles of your local bookstore, you find lots of books that promise to unleash your inner creative genius. So, when a research finding comes along that suggests an easy way to improve your creativity, you should sit up and listen. A paper by Evan Polman and Kyle Emich in the April 2011 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin provides just this kind of straightforward demonstration. One of the factors that often prevents people from doing something really creative is their existing knowledge. If you are writing a song, it is hard to come up with something that is very different from what other people have written, because you are reminded of melodies that you have heard before. If you are solving a problem at work, there is a tendency to focus on solutions that people have used in the past to solve similar problems. So how do you break away from the influence of the past? Polman and Emich make use of construal level theory. This theory, developed by Yaacov Trope, Nira Liberman and their colleagues, suggests that we think about things that are near to us in space or time in specific terms, but we think about things that are far from us in space or time in more abstract terms. For example, when thinking about a trip you might take to Paris next summer, you might focus on how much fun it would be or how great it would be to sit in a caf

Posted by on April 16, 2011. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.