Conceptual priming in a generative problem-solving task

Abstract

Three experiments explored how participants solved a very open-ended generative problem-solving task. Previous research has shown that when participants are shown examples, novel creations will tend to conform to features shared across those examples (Smith, Ward, & Schumacher, 1993); We made the shared features of the examples conceptually related to one another. Wefound that when the features were related to the concept of hostility, participants' creations contained hostile features that were not part of any of the examples. These results suggest that participants will design novel entities to be consistent with emergent properties of examples shown to them. We also found that a mild hostility prime from unscrambling sentences had a similar conceptual effect. Together, the two effects suggest that conceptual priming of generative cognitive tasks will influence the cognitive aspects of the creative process.Generative cognitive tasks, as they will be labeled here, are tasks that require participants to devise novel products. For example, participants have been asked to design novel space creatures to inhabit a distant planet (Marsh,

Experiencing Creativity in the Organization: From Individual Creativity to Collective Creativity

“…This enables them to think outside the box. Priming can, in fact, reduce creativity, as the participants tend to be preoccupied with already-known solutions (Dahl & Moreau, 2002;Marsh, Bink, & Hicks, 1999).…”

Don’t stereotype, think different! Overcoming automatic stereotype activation by mindset priming

“…The conformity to given examples did not decrease when participants were explicitly instructed to create ideas that were very diVerent from the provided examples, even though they were able to list the features they were asked to avoid (Marsh, Ward, & Landau, 1999;Smith, Ward, & Schumacher, 1993). Most likely the plagiarism occurs because examples are highly accessible during idea generation and this activated knowledge impacts on the generated ideas without awareness (Marsh, Bink, & Hicks, 1999) and thus beyond intentional control.…”

The relationship of analogical distance to analogical function and preinventive structure: the case of engineering design

“…Prime examples include such phenomena as functional fixedness, which involves restricting the uses of objects to well-known functions (Maier, 1931), and mental set, which involves situationally induced obstacles to problem solving (Luchins, 1942). Furthermore, it has been found that providing (Dahl & Moreau, 2002;Jaarsveld & van Leeuwen, 2005;Jansson & Smith, 1991;Marsh, Bink, & Hicks, 1999;Marsh, Ward, & Landau, 1999;Ward, 1994) or retrieving (Ward, 1994) existing examples may inhibit generative creative processes and may lead to a higher proportion of property transfers from the examples into the subject's own work (e.g., Marsh, Landau, & Hicks, 1996), even when the subject is explicitly instructed to avoid such transfer (e.g., Smith, Ward, & Schumacher, 1993). Source monitoring of this property transfer is especially poor in generative tasks (e.g., Marsh, Landau, & Hicks, 1997), which originally led to the label unconscious plagiarism, or cryptomnesia (Brown & Murphy, 1989;Marsh & Bower, 1993;Marsh & Landau, 1995;.…”