Finding Creativity by Changing Perspectives: How the Evaluation Process Contributes to Creative Idea Recognition

ABSTRACT Why do people often fail to find new ideas creative? The literature indicates people fail to find creativity due to ideas having characteristics that are incongruent with people’s existing perspectives. The current paper identifies a second reason stemming from the need for evaluators to understand what ideas are before determining if those ideas meet evaluation criteria. We propose that to find creativity in early phase ambiguous ideas, people’s existing perspectives may not be helpful. People may need to engage in a process of perspective change by searching for and finding alternative fruitful interpretations. Three studies provide evidence that people tended to evaluate ideas as more creative if they spontaneously experienced (Study 1) or were induced to experience (Study 2) a change in perspective when evaluating them. Further, if people were induced not to experience a perspective change, ideas were perceived as less creative (Study 3). These findings add to theory by revealing new aspects of the process of evaluating early phase ideas. They also support practice by identifying why spending more time searching for and potentially finding fruitful interpretations of early phase ideas might help evaluators find creativity, and thereby support rather than squelch innovation. Plain Language Summary The current research identifies a gap in the prior creativity literature on evaluation, which has focused primarily on how people evaluate later phase ideas. We observe that, unlike later phase ideas, early phase ideas may lead evaluators to undertake an additional, initial stage in the idea evaluation process. Early phase ideas are often ambiguous, abstract, and difficult to communicate, which can mean evaluators might need to interpret these ideas in new ways before rendering judgments. As a result, people may experience variation in the process of evaluating early phase ideas. We show that this variation helps explain creativity assessments. During later phase idea evaluation, the creativity literature notes that evaluators use their existing perspectives to determine if ideas are useful via convergent thinking. In contrast, during early phase idea evaluation when ideas are ambiguous, evaluators’ existing perspectives may not help them make sense of ideas, resulting in their viewing these ideas as bizarre and so not creative. It is also possible for evaluators to assimilate ideas into existing perspectives, thereby viewing these ideas as trivial and so not creative. Further still, evaluators may engage in a process of perspective change by searching for (i.e., divergent thinking) and finding (i.e., convergent thinking) a fruitful new perspective with which to appreciate ideas, thereby finding creativity. Our findings suggest that recognizing early phase new ideas as creative can involve a similar kind of thinking as generating creative ideas, namely a perspective change process of seeking out and finding alternative perspectives. Therefore, the evaluation of early phase creative ideas, much like the generation of creative ideas, can be a cognitively effortful activity. An additional implication is that the process people enact during idea evaluation, separate from any characteristics of the ideas themselves, influences how creative those ideas appear to be. Taken together, the results from the current study advance our understanding of why recognizing creative ideas can be hard, what might help, and why thinking about creativity as a process of changing perspectives can be useful.