Daffodil International University
Help & Support => Common Forum/Request/Suggestions => Topic started by: abu_jafar on September 09, 2014, 02:43:54 PM
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New research suggests we generate more creative ideas for other people than for ourselves.
Imagine there’s a prisoner trying to escape from a high tower. All he has is a rope but it’s only half as long as the drop from the window. Still, he manages to escape from the tower by dividing the rope in half and tying it back together. How is that possible?
People were given slightly different versions of this test in a new study byPolman and Emich (2011). Half were given this version of the puzzle while the other half were told to imagine it was they themselves who were stuck in the tower, rather than an unnamed ‘prisoner’. Both groups then had to explain how the escape from the tower was possible.
What happened was that 66% of people got the answer right when told it was a nameless ‘prisoner’ who was stuck in the tower. But when told to imagine they were stuck in the tower themselves, only 48% got it right.
(The answer to the problem is: the rope is divided in half width-ways rather than length-ways. Then you can halve the width and double the length.)
In a second study, they tested the same thing in a different way. This time it was to see how creative people could be when they were thinking up gift ideas. People were asked to think up ideas for themselves or for other people. The other people were also divided into two categories. Some were people who were socially close and others were socially distant.
When the ideas were analysed, participants who were thinking up ideas for socially distant others were most creative. The other two conditions lagged behind.
The reason this happens is to do with the way the mind represents problems like this. When we think about a ‘nameless other’ or the prisoner in the high tower, our minds tend to think more abstractly. In an abstract frame it becomes easier to make creative leaps because we aren’t stuck thinking about concrete details.