Burdens of the brilliant
| 12 January, 2012 | Laura Buchholz |
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Please answer this one-question test:
- Creativity is
- A) Good.
B) Bad.
Did you choose option A? Of course you did, because nobody would say they hate creativity – it would be like saying you hate the special olympics. But a new study, “The bias against creativity: why people desire but reject creative ideas”, by Jennifer S. Mueller (The Wharton School), Shimul Melwani (University of Pennsylvania), and Jack A. Goncalo (Cornell University) reveals a hitherto unknown ambivalence about creativity that lives under the surface, camouflaged, like a suckerfish. According to their paper, people experiencing uncertainty tend to hold an unacknowledged negative bias against creativity. Furthermore, those holding such a bias also have more difficulty recognizing a creative idea when they encounter one.
In this study, the authors conducted two experiments, in which each had a designated “uncertainty” group (members in this group were told they could receive extra money, but that it would be distributed via lottery. Stressful.). Experiment 1 tested the subjects’ reaction to words representing creativity vs. practicality. Experiment 2 had the participants write essays on creative problem-solving, and then rate the creativity and practicality of a new running shoe.
Both experiments uncovered a hidden negative bias against creativity in the uncertainty group. Furthermore, the uncertainty group rated the novel shoe idea as less creative than did the control group.
While reading this study, I was reminded of the fact that both the US TV channels HBO and Showtime passed on the show “Mad Men” before it went on to become a hit series on AMC. Certainly, many such examples exist in the arts world. And, of course, there are plentiful such stories from science: think heliocentrism and continental drift. In biology, think Margulis’ theory of endosymbiosis and McClintock’s jumping genes.
Faculty of 1000 member Eduard Stange writes in his evaluation of the article that such biases are not confined to the distant past:
Quite recently, it took years for the Helicobacter theory of ulcer disease to be accepted, and I was one of the skeptics. Similarly, even this year’s Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine discusses Crohn’s disease in terms of dysregulated adaptive immune response and ignores the overwhelming evidence for a defective barrier.
And the uncertainty effect may not be limited to individual decision-making. As the authors write:
If people hold an implicit bias against creativity, then we cannot assume that organizations, institutions, or even scientific endeavors will desire and recognize creative ideas even when they explicitly state that they want them.
Oh boy. So what are the creatively inclined to do? It seems that the problem is not a supply of creative ideas, but rather how to gain acceptance for those ideas already out there in circulation. Therefore, the authors conclude that,
…the field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identifying how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.
In other words, we need more scientific AMCs to pick up the slack that the HBOs leave behind.
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McClintock’s jumping genes are NOT an example of bias against creativity. No one doubted that she had found movable genetic elements. What they doubted was her interpretation of those elements’ evolutionary significance–an interpretation that remains unsupported today. See my book, The Tangled Field Harvard, 2001).
In my opinion the question is not well posed. Put it this way:
Creativity is usually perceived as:
good
bad
and then think about it. Think about how avant-gardes are considered by the majority of the population. The most creative person I met in my life so far was Frank Zappa. His favorite sentence (and mine too) was: without deviation from the norm progress is not possible. Creativity is deviation from the norm. The norm is what most people think and do. Deviations from norms are perceived as bad by these guys. And they are the majority. So, sorry folks, but I am not impressed if somebody makes and experiment and finds that creativity is perceived as bad.
Of course nobody would label him or herself as being biased against creativity. They are just against silly ideas! Which is the way creativity is perceived in the first place.
Once perceived as good, creativity has lost much of its appeal, it has become a norm. Creativity breaks dogmas and sparks cultural and scientific revolutions (sometimes). Ask Galileo Galilei if creativity is perceived as good or bad. I am not saying that the scientific community at large is like the Inquisition, but read just some posts below and see how many problems the authors of a paper showing that, when dealing with cancer and molecular signatures, correlation might not mean causation. The Inquisition (i.e. the editorial board of leading journals) rejected their creative idea that it might not be the case that genetic markers are the signature of cancer. And they had a lot of trouble in publishing their stuff. Very interesting story. This one, I am sorry to say it, is not creative enough, it just identifies a norm.
Sorry, I have something more to say. Of course what I wrote above does not mean that if your papers are rejected by the editorial boards of leading journals then you are a creative scientist. You might simply be a producer of silly ideas. Mainstream scientists safely remain in their domain, learn a technique, produce clean experiments and data and journals like their papers. They are cited for some time (enough to push up the IF of the journal) and then they are rapidly forgotten. But who cares about the scores of Cited Half Life of a journal? There is no space for complains about the way the world is. This is the life. Borrowing a nice definition of evolutionary innovations, creative persons are the hopeful monsters of culture and science.