Overreliance on conceptually far sources decreases the creativity of ideas

Overreliance on conceptually far sources decreases the creativity of ideas Joel Chan (joc59@pitt.edu), Christian Schunn (schunn@pitt.edu) Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh 3939 O’Hara St, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Steven Dow (spdow@cs.cmu.edu) Human Computer-Interaction Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA design re-usable electronics parts). The central question we consider here is: what are the relative benefits of different levels of source conceptual distance for creative outcomes? Many authors, principally those studying the role of anal- ogy in the creative process, have proposed that conceptually far sources — structurally similar ideas with many surface (or object) dissimilarities (e.g., the atom/solar system analo- gy) — have more potential to yield more creative ideas (Gentner & Markman, 1997; Holyoak & Thagard, 1996; Ward, 1998). Empirically, the literature provides a mixed picture. A number of studies have shown an advantage of far over near sources for quality and flexibility of ideation, in addition to novelty of ideas (Chan et al., 2011; Chiu & Shu, 2012; Dahl & Moreau, 2002; Goncalves et al., 2013; Hende et al., 2002). However, some in vivo studies of crea- tive discovery have failed to find strong connections be- tween far sources and creative mental leaps (Chan & Schunn, accepted), and other experiments have demonstrat- ed equivalent benefits of both far and near sources for crea- tive outcomes (Enkel & Gassmann, 2010; Malaga, 2000; Tseng et al., 2008), and even harmful effects of distance on creative outcomes (Fu et al., 2013) What does this imply for theories of creative inspiration? Perhaps it is necessary to abandon or revise the theory that far sources uniquely support creativity, in line with theorists like Perkins (1983), who argues that conceptual distance does not matter, or Weisberg (2009), who argues that with- in-domain expertise is a primary driver of creativity. How- ever, this assumes that opposing findings have a strong em- pirical foundation. Here, we argue that this is not the case: there are key methodological shortcomings in prior work that should be addressed before considering theory revision. One potential methodological shortcoming is that the length of prior studies (typically 30 minutes to 1 hour prob- lem-solving time) may be too short to observe the potential long-term payoffs of cross-domain inspiration. Scarce cog- nitive resources are required to ignore irrelevant surface details and attend to potentially insightful structural simi- larities. This might partially explain losses in fluency some- times observed with the use of far sources (Chan et al., 2011; Hender et al., 2002). Problem solvers may be unwill- ing or unable to pay these higher relative costs of processing far sources in the context of a short task, whereas the pro- cessing cost would be reasonable on a more realistic design time scale. For example, 20 minutes is a substantial cost when the ideation phase is 1 hour long, but a negligible cost Abstract Ideas are often generated from inspiration sources (e.g., prior experiences with the world, solutions to analogous problems). These sources may have benefits but also pitfalls (e.g., diffi- culty thinking of alternative approaches). In this paper, we in- vestigate whether and how features of inspiration sources predict their impact on creative outcomes. In particular, we examine the popular but unevenly supported hypothesis that conceptually distant sources of inspiration provide the best in- sights for creative production. We test this hypothesis in the context of a Web-based real-world creativity platform, while addressing key methodological issues in prior empirical stud- ies (e.g., truncated time scale, low statistical power, problem variation). Through a text analysis of many hundreds of con- cepts, we test whether greater conceptual distance between a concept’s cited sources and the problem domain increases its probability of creative success (in this case, being shortlisted by an expert panel as a promising creative concept). We found that concepts that cite sources had greater success than those that did not cite sources of inspiration. However, in- creases in mean conceptual distance of sources actually de- creased the probability of success, suggesting that far sources do not uniquely boost creativity and that an overreliance on far sources may even harm creativity. This negative effect of distance was robust across authors and different design prob- lems on the platform. In light of these findings, we revisit theories of creative inspiration and general creative cognition. Keywords: Creativity; analogy; problem-solving; in-vivo Introduction In the creative process, people inevitably build new ideas from sources of inspiration, most often from their prior knowledge and experiences (Ward, 1994). These sources of inspiration can lead one astray — e.g., incorporating unde- sirable features from existing solutions (Jansson & Smith, 1991), difficulty thinking of alternative approaches (Wiley, 1998) — but sometimes drive creative breakthroughs (Eck- ert & Stacey, 1998; Hargadon & Sutton, 1997). Are there features of inspirations that can predict when they will harm or hurt creativity? One potential feature of interest is the conceptual distance of those sources from one’s working domain. For instance, consider the problem of e-waste ac- cumulation: the world generates 20-50 million metric tons of e-waste every year, yielding environmentally hazardous additions to landfills. An innovator might approach this problem by building on near sources like smaller-scale elec- tronics reuse/recycle efforts, or by drawing inspiration from a far source like edible food packaging technology (e.g., to