Psychology of Creativity: Art, Science and Technology

Until the middle of the 20th century, creativity was generally considered as a psychological attribute of an artist and, sometimes, of a scientist. Then in the late 1950s, J.P. Gulliford applied the idea of creative thinking to technological inventions.

Nowadays, engineers and scientists are expected to be creative. A recent paper shows how creativity in science/tech and art relate to personality traits, the so-called Big Five:

The Big Five personality dimension Openness/Intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement.

We confirmed the hypothesis that whereas Openness predicts creative achievement in the arts, Intellect predicts creative achievement in the sciences. Inclusion of performance measures of general cognitive ability and divergent thinking indicated that the relation of Intellect to scientific creativity may be due at least in part to these abilities. Lastly, we found that Extraversion additionally predicted creative achievement in the arts, independently of Openness. Results are discussed in the context of dual-process theory.

A related paper outlined the overall relationship between the Big Five, by grouping them into two complementary categories - Stability and Plasticity.

Remarkably, the brain uses a broad range of cognitive strategies to pursue goals within a social context. Given a chance, we can exercise our creative options through technological innovation.

As a side remark, from an innovation theory perspective, the brain and society solve the stability-plasticity dilemma by using both traits, e.g. through the separation in space and time.

Lunch Talk: Moral Tribes (Joshua Greene gives a talk at Google)

Note how his experiments show the relationship b/w physical distance and psychological distance. A similar effect happens when inventors are trying to explain their ideas to investors. I also like his analogy between Kahneman's System 1 vs System 2 on one the hand, and point-and-shoot and SLR cameras on the other: the former is set on automatic, while the latter on manual.

Trade-off of the Day: Warmth vs Competence

In Scalable Innovation, we show how breaking, instead of making trade-offs, allows innovators create breakthrough technology and business solutions. It turns out, successful solutions to trade-offs in human psychology can also be beneficial in one's personal or professional life.

For example, here's how people typically perceive others in two psychologically important dimensions - Warmth and Competence*:

Figure 1 Each quadrant represents a unique combination of warmth and competence. The Partner, combining warmth and competence, inspires admiration. Its opposite, the Parasite, inspires contempt or disgust. The Predator and Pet inspire ambivalent feelings: the cold and competent Predator breeds resentment, while the warm and incompetent Pet inspires pity.

As you can see from the diagram, an ideal situations puts one into the upper right corner labeled "Partner", which combines high Warmth with high Competence. But research shows that in real life, people typically judge others in just one dimension and infer the other one through an implicit trade-off:

Theoretically, warmth and competence judgments vary independently, but in practice they are often negatively correlated, so that groups are stereotyped ambivalently as warm but incompetent, or competent but cold — an effect termed social compensation. For example, older people are perceived as warm but incompetent, and regarded with pity, whereas rich people are perceived as competent but cold, and regarded with envy. 

These ambivalent stereotypes are so ingrained that accentuating only one positive dimension about a person actually implies negativity on the omitted dimension — a secret language of stereotypes perpetuated by communicators and listeners. Indeed, the tendency to focus on the positive dimension of an ambivalent stereotype while implying the negative dimension has increased as social norms against expressing prejudice have developed.**

As we can see, even being perceived in a positive light can lead to negative personal and professional consequences. Therefore instead of succumbing to the trade-off, a psychologically-aware problem-solver would have to use one of the separation techniques to break the trade-off and demonstrate both warmth and competence.

I think I'll turn this real-life problem into a quiz for one of Stanford CSP invention/innovation courses.

* source: The Middleman Economy, by Marina Krakovsky
** source: doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2016.01.004. Promote up, ingratiate down: Status comparisons drive warmth-competence tradeoffs in impression management. Swencionis & Fiske, 2016.

The new Digital Divide

The New York Times shows how mobile app designers devise new ways to get teenagers' attention during the day,

Push notifications — those incessant reminders that make your phone light up and ding — are the infantry of app warfare, cracking the attention span to remind users that someone on the Internet might be talking about them. All summer Wishbone had been sending out alerts four times a day, but the three men were thinking about adding more and, now that students were back in class, trying to recalibrate around the school day. 

“Can we have a friends feed at noon?” Mr. Jones asked Mr. Vatere. “It would be great to do ‘Your friends have updated.’ ”

“And you talk about it while you’re at school,” Mr. Pham added.

What are the implications: not for the business and advertisers, which the NYT article discusses, but for the kids, their families and the society at large?

We already know that frequent interruptions worsen kids' learning performance. We also know that pre-teens and teens are becoming addicted to their mobiles. Given that well-funded and market-savvy mobile app developers create new ways to target kids during school hours, we can predict that there will be a learning gap between kids who can manage their mobile distractions and those who cannot.

The old Digital Divide existed between people who had online access and those who had not. The underlying assumption was that the former were better off because they had access to all the information information needed to learn effectively.

I believe the assumption is no longer valid. Having access to the internet all the time is becoming detrimental to learning. Arguably, it's worse than television because kids get bombarded with distractions and advertisement all the time, rather than during the leisure hours.

The new Digital Divide is going to emerge between those who can manage their online time and those who cannot. Online learning may even broaden this divide because it will provide the motivated with greater opportunities to excel. Most likely, we already seeing signs of things to come through the low completion rates in virtual universities — 3-5%: few get huge benefits, while the majority does not. Paradoxically, online learning has become a natural selection environment for the next generation of schoolchildren addicted to their ubiquitous social interactions.

tags: psychology, mobile, learning, virtual, media, advertisement

Predicting smartphone addiction in kids

A study of South Korean elementary school kids has found that stress and lack of self-control are the strongest predictors of the "smartphone" addiction. Although the device to deliver the addiction is the smartphone, the real hooks for the addiction are Social Networking (SNS) and entertainment services (via BBC news).

Since the mobile has become a dominant platform for delivering entertainment services, in a period of two generations we can expect a migration of television advertisement money into online services. The TV and the web are going to go into oblivion like the newsprint. We can also expect that Twitter will not catch up with Facebook or other major SNS'.

Also, it appears that the humanity is running a large-scale Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, dividing kids into those who can exert self–control and those who cannot. 

The first follow-up study, in 1988, showed that "preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm, were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent."
A second follow-up study, in 1990, showed that the ability to delay gratification also correlated with higher SATscores.^[5]

From an innovation theory perspective, the smartphone represents the Dominant Design, while online services - the Dominant Use.

Lunch Talk: Getting stuck in the negatives (and how to get unstuck) | Alison Ledgerwood

Alison Ledgerwood joined the Department of Psychology at UC Davis in 2008 after completing her PhD in social psychology at New York University. She is interested in understanding how people think, and how they can think better. Her research, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, investigates how certain ways of thinking about an issue tend to stick in people's heads. Her classes on social psychology focus on understanding the way people think and behave in social situations, and how to harness that knowledge to potentially improve the social world in which we all live.


tags: lunchtalk, psychology, problem

Lunch Talk: Daniel Kahneman on The Machinery of the Mind

Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, on The Machinery of the Mind. Kahneman is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics.




tags: psychology, creativity, system, lunchtalk, science

Smartphone: the greatest personal device ever?

According to Gallup, more and more people can't imagine their life without their smartphone:

The device has become our ultimate interface into the world of social interactions and productivity. It's hard to find in the history of technology a device that is more personal than that. Adding more devices to one's personal network is likely to increase our dependance on the smartphone.

tags: invention, innovation, mobile, interface, social, biology, networking, psychology

Today I learned (TIL) a new word: Skeuomorph

Skeuomorph (n. from the Greek words skeuos and morph) - A design feature that is carried forth from the original version of a product in order to make people feel comfortable with the new device. For example, the click sound on a digital camera comes from an audio clip; however, the original sound was the actual shutter opening and closing.

The original iTunes logo featured the CD but the application actually provided a way for the users to get rid of their CDs. 

iPhone would be a typical skeuomorph too because it intentionally links a new category of mobile devices ("i"-device) with the familiar functionality of the phone. The name lowers psychological barriers to technology adoption by consumers



I'm reading Stefan Larsson's article about how the legal system deals with innovation in conflict situations: "Metaphors, law and digital phenomena: the Swedish Pirate Bay court case." Stefan extends the original meaning of skeuomorph from the world of physical objects into the realm of metaphors and legal concepts. He argues that

In line with conceptual metaphor theory, which states that abstract thinking is largely metaphorical, the article argues that this is true also for digital phenomena that, thus, are largely understood through metaphors and skeumorphs.

I find this N. Katherine Hayles quote particularly relevant to my invention work:

The new becomes more acceptable when it refers back to the earlier iteration that it is displacing, while the earlier iteration becomes more valuable when it is placed in a context where we can experience the new. A skeumorph simultaneously focuses on the past and future, while reinforcing and undermining both.

Usually, the baggage of old thinking embedded into a skeumorph constrains inventor's imagination, limiting the range of scenarios that can be achieved by a new technology. To get rid of skeuomorphs and associated with them mental entanglements, I try to use non-technical terms as much as possible ("pretend that you are explaining your new ida to a 10-year-old"). Another way to deal with the issue is to use the system model, which prompts abstract, analytical thinking.

tags: psychology, invention, science

How to help a group of teenagers to achieve a creative peak

Russian writer and teacher Dmitry Bykov shares his method of helping teenagers maximize their creative potential:

(Russian version) Есть два способа добиться от детей абсолютного творческого максимума: во-первых, умеренная невротизация (все зависит от вас, доверяем только вам, больше никто не справится и т.д.). Во-вторых — сопутствующее ей, идущее в ногу с ней повышение самооценки: вы лучшие, вы сможете, вас собрали не просто так.

(a shortened English version)

To get a peak creative performance from a group of teenagers, tell them:

- everything depends on you (the children); nobody else can do it.
- you are the best; it's no accident that we included you in this elite group.

Bykov's recommendation aims at producing among the group members a moderate level of neuroticism and raise their self esteem at the same time. We know from a recent study that elevated neuroticism helps increase creativity, by stimulating divergent thinking. Most likely, adding high self-esteem to the psychological mix  extends idea generation into the realm of "impossible", further increasing the divergence and extra effort.

Should work for adults too.

tags: psychology, creativity, brainstorming, divergent

Worry is the mother of invention

A recent psychological study from Singapore Management University has found that being worried can help one's creativity:

By systematically manipulating the experience of emotional states, those who actually experienced worrisome emotions produced creative designs that were rated as being more creative by their peers (Study 2) and were more cognitively flexible in generating unusual uses of a common object under high cognitive load (Study 3).

Note that the study uses divergent thinking as the proxy for creativity. Taking this into account, we can say that being worried makes one to consider a greater range of options. This may also explain why in times of uncertainty and trouble people generate many conspiracy theories. It's not clear what emotional state helps separate good ideas from the bad ones.

tags: creativity, psychology, thinking, cognition, research

Lunch Talk: Focus and Attention

Combining cutting-edge research with practical findings, Focus delves into the science of attention in all its varieties, presenting a long overdue discussion of this little-noticed and under-rated mental asset. In an era of unstoppable distractions, Goleman persuasively argues that now more than ever we must learn to sharpen focus if we are to survive in a complex world.

Goleman boils down attention research into a threesome: inner, other, and outer focus. Drawing on rich case studies from fields as diverse as competitive sports, education, the arts, and business, he shows why high-achievers need all three kinds of focus, and explains how those who rely on Smart Practices—mindfulness meditation, focused preparation and recovery, positive emotions and connections, and mental "prosthetics" that help them improve habits, add new skills, and sustain greatness—excel while others do not.


tags: psychology, lunchtalk

Lunch Talk: Happiness is a precursor to success.

Shawn Achor visits Google to discuss his most recent book, Before Happiness. In his last book, Shawn described why happiness is the precursor to success. Here, Shawn explains that before we can be happy or successful, we need to first develop the ability to see that positive change is possible.

About the Author: Shawn Achor is an American educator, author, and speaker known for his advocacy of positive psychology. He is best known for his research reversing the formula of success leading to happiness—his research shows that happiness in fact leads to success.




tags: lunchtalk, psychology

More organic food => harsher moral judgements.

A recent research paper on the influence of organic foods shows the "moral licensing" effect:

After viewing a few organic foods, comfort foods, or control foods, participants who were exposed to organic foods volunteered significantly less time to help a needy stranger, and they judged moral transgressions significantly harsher than those who viewed nonorganic foods.

(Source: Kendall J. Eskine. Social Psychological and Personality Science 2013 4: 251 originally published online 15 May 2012 DOI: 10.1177/1948550612447114).

People feel morally superior when they have even an unconscious perception of doing good things (eating organic, being "green," describing self in positive terms, etc.). There seems to be a trade-off between doing something prosocial now and anti-social later; as if we have limited "goodness" resources in our minds.

Another paper on the effects of green purchasing concludes:

...people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products than after purchasing conventional products. ( Source: Do Green Products Make Us Better People? Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong Psychological Science 2010 21: 494 originally published online 5 March 2010 DOI: 10.1177/0956797610363538 )

tags: trade-off, psychology, social

Lunch Talk: (@Google) Cognitive Science and Mediation.

Speaker: Philippe Goldin
Philippe is a research
scientist and heads the Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience group in
the Department of Psychology at Stanford University.

He spent 6 years in India and Nepal studying various languages, Buddhist philosophy and debate at Namgyal Monastery and the Dialectic Monastic Institute, and serving as an interpreter for various Tibetan Buddhist lamas. He then returned to the U.S. to complete a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University. His NIH-funded clinical research focuses on (a) functional neuroimaging investigations of cognitive-affective mechanisms in adults with anxiety disorders, (b) comparing the effects of mindfulness meditation and cognitive-behavioral therapy on brain-behavior correlates of emotional reactivity and regulation, and (c) training children in family and elementary school settings in mindfulness skills to reduce anxiety and enhance compassion, self-esteem and quality of family interactions.




lunchtalk, psychology, biology, social

Lab Notebook: Emotions, Metaphors, and Creativity.

When people talk about their emotions they often use metaphors because it is difficult to express how you feel in words. In everyday life we solve this language problem by using common experiences with objects as metaphors. In the 1980s, UC Berkeley psychologists Lakoff and Kovecses studied the connection between emotions and metaphors. The metaphor of a fluid in a container (hot, cold, boiling, flowing etc.) turned out to be associated with all major emotions: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, love, lust, pride, shame, and others. We are so used to dealing with water and other liquids that when something unknown and unfamiliar is presented as "water" it becomes easily accessible to our minds.

Here's a great example how a difficult concept can be explained to a lay audience: Robert Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, shows the work of his new incredible electronic device as water flowing over the dam. In the picture, charged elements (electrons and holes) become "water," while the electro-magnetic field that controls the flow of the current is shown as a dam barrier that can be raised or lowered to control the flow of "water."

Remarkably, the metaphors of UP and DOWN are also frequently used to describe emotions, e.g. "I feel a bit down today," or "Lighten up!".

Max and I should try to use the common metaphors discovered by Lackoff and Koveses to explain how our system model works. In Scalable Innovation (Chapter 3) I use "train" to explain a difficult patent, but water would probably work even better.

tags: creativity, psychology, emotion, system

Cognitive vs Noncognitive skills: employment impact

A brief quote from an NBER paper:

.. we find that noncognitive ability has a higher return than cognitive ability for unskilled workers and managers while skilled workers and non-managerial positions face a higher return on cognitive than to noncognitive ability.

Noncognitive traits are common to successful highly-paid managers and low-paid workers. This might explain a certain disdain highly-paid engineers show toward marketing and manager types.

tags: education, psychology, economics

Creativity quote of the day: a simple good idea beaten to death.

A couple of quotes from Eugene Fama's Nobel Prize lecture:

- That's characteristic of everything I do: It's obvious on hindsight, but it was not obvious before the fact.

- When I come up with a [good] idea I beat it to death.

- The cute little insight we had was that if you want to aggregate this information across all of the stock experiencing splits [processes under investigation] you change the way you measure time. You measure time relative to the event.

The last point is similar to the approach of another Nobel Laureate, psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who emphasizes the deliberate, systematic nature of creative thinking.

tags: creativity, quote, system, psychology

Is China the new United States? Maybe

Over a hundred years ago (1902), the British witnessed the "made in the US" tsunami:

The average citizen wakes in the morning at the sound of an American alarum clock; rises from his New England sheets, and shaves with his New York soap, and Yankee safety razor. He pulls on a pair of Boston boots over his socks from West Carolina, fastens his Connecticut braces, slips his Waterbury watch into his pocket and sits down to breakfast . . . Rising from his breakfast table the citizen rushes out, catches an electric tram made in New York, to Shepherds Bush, where he gets into a Yankee elevator, which takes him on to the American-fitted railway to the city. At his office of course everything is American. He sits on a Nebraska swivel chair, before a Michigan roll-top desk, writes his letter on a Syracuse typewriter, signing them with a New York fountain pen, and drying them with a blotting sheet from New England. The letter copies are put away in files manufactured in Grand Rapids. (Source: The Grand Pursuit, by Silvia Nasar.)

And that was even before Ford's invention of the mass-production method!

The similarity with today's Chinese products in the US is uncanny. Except for the infrastructure, services,  and experiences, most of the stuff we use in our everyday lives is made outside of the US. Despite this production-consumption pattern, there's no Chinese brands among the top 100. Since branding is based on recognition, I bet, if they changed their alphabet or started using westernized name brands they would dominate markets for consumer products and services much sooner. (American and British names are very close and the psychological barrier to consumer adoption is extremely low).

tags: psychology, market, distribution, experience

Lunch Talk: Placebo Effects.

UC Berkeley Cognitive Science C102, Lecture 6.

Expensive placebos work better than cheap ones.
Big placebo pills are more effective than little placebo pills.
Dark-colored placebo pills are more effective than light-colored placebo pills.
Placebo pills that taste bad are more effective than placebos that taste good.
Placebo delivered intravenously is more effective than a placebo delivered intra-muscularly.
Placebo delivered through a needle are more effective than delivered through the mouth.

If you tell somebody that you are giving him a placebo it stops being effective.