Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2016 Feb 10;11(2):e0142567.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0142567. eCollection 2016.

The Creative Stereotype Effect

Denis Dumas  1 , Kevin N Dunbar  1
Affiliations

The Creative Stereotype Effect

Denis Dumas et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Because of its fundamental relevance to scientific innovation, artistic expression, and human ingenuity, creativity has long been the subject of systematic psychological investigation. Concomitantly, the far-reaching effects of stereotypes on various cognitive and social processes have been widely researched. Bridging these two literatures, we show in a series of two studies that stereotypes related to creativity can both enhance and diminish individuals' performance on a divergent thinking task. Specifically, Study 1 demonstrated that participants asked to take on a stereotypically uninhibited perspective performed significantly better on a divergent thinking task than those participants who took on a stereotypically inhibited perspective, and a control group. Relatedly, Study 2 showed that the same effect is found within-subjects, with divergent thinking significantly improving when participants invoke an uninhibited stereotype. Moreover, we demonstrate the efficacy of Latent Semantic Analysis as an objective measure of the originality of ideas, and discuss implications of our findings for the nature of creativity. Namely, that creativity may not be best described as a stable individual trait, but as a malleable product of context and perspective.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Standardized fluency and originality scores in each of three conditions for Study 1.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Standardized fluency scores by item for Study 1.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Standardized originality scores by item for Study 2.
Fig 4
Fig 4. Standardized fluency and originality scores in each of two conditions for Study 2.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. 1. Eysenck H. J. (1993). Creativity and Personality: Suggestions for a Theory. Psychological Inquiry, 4(3), 147–178.
    1. Storme M., Lubart T. (2012). Conceptions of Creativity and Relations with Judges’ Intelligence and Personality. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 46(2), 138–149. 10.1002/jocb.10 - DOI
    1. Guilford J.P. (1950). Creativity. American Psychologist, 5, 444–454. - PubMed
    1. Guilford J.P. (1967). The Nature of Human Intelligence. New York: McGraw-Hil1.
    1. Hudson L. (1968). Frames of mind: Ability, perception and self-perception in the arts and sciences. Oxford England: W. W. Norton.

LinkOut - more resources