The influence of exposure to randomness on lateral thinking in divergent, convergent, and creative search.
Creativity
Decision making
Judgment
Randomness
Journal
Cognition
ISSN: 1873-7838
Titre abrégé: Cognition
Pays: Netherlands
ID NLM: 0367541
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
01 2022
01 2022
Historique:
received:
16
02
2021
revised:
05
10
2021
accepted:
11
10
2021
pubmed:
25
10
2021
medline:
4
2
2022
entrez:
24
10
2021
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
Exposure to random stimuli has often been suggested to help unlock problem-solving abilities and creativity, helping us to see problems differently and imagine new possibilities. Equally, randomness is widely used in computer science to escape local maxima and find effective solutions to intractable problems. However, randomness has rarely been used as a formal aid in human decision making or investigated in controlled experimental settings. In this pre-registered study, we tested the effect of extraneous random stimuli using Wikipedia's random page generator on 592 British participants' performance across three online tasks: one 'convergent' forecasting task and two 'divergent' fluency tasks. We found no improvement associated with the treatment and often significant impairment. A Bayesian meta-analysis of the tasks finds strong support for the null hypothesis. We conclude that stimulating lateral thinking through random stimuli is non-trivial and may require such stimuli to be sufficiently task-related or 'optimally random'.
Identifiants
pubmed: 34689011
pii: S0010-0277(21)00360-7
doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104937
pii:
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Meta-Analysis
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
104937Informations de copyright
Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier B.V.