Several years ago, I supervised the Master's thesis of Louis Ho, one of my former graduate students. Louis and I were interested in investigating whether cultures might possess traits that either promote or hinder creative thinking. Of course, this does not imply that all individuals in culture X will be more creative than all those from culture Y rather it is a statement of averages at the population level (e.g., are individuals from culture X on average more creative than those from culture Y?).
Our first challenge was to decide which cultural traits (if any) might be linked to creativity. The Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede has proposed perhaps the most famous set of cultural traits: Power Distance Index, Masculinity-Femininity, Individualism-Collectivism, Uncertainty Avoidance Index, and Long versus Short-Term Orientation. You can read more about each of these cultural traits here. We theorized that a country's score on Individualism-Collectivism would affect the creative juices that might be "permitted" to flow from members of a particular culture. The challenge was to devise an experimental procedure that would allow us to gauge creativity within individualist versus collectivist cultures. Brainstorming is often used as a proxy for creativity in the literature, so we decided to conduct brainstorming tasks using culturally neutral stimuli in Taiwan (a collectivist society) and in Canada (an individualist society).
In the context of the brainstorming tasks, we hypothesized that members of an individualistic society would perform particularly well in such a task ("I'd like to come up with the million dollar idea") versus those from a collectivist ethos who would be more restrained in their willingness to freely engage in this type of ideation process ("I do not wish to stand out from the group."). We ended up collecting data on five key dependent measures:
(1) The number of ideas that were generated in the brainstorming tasks
(2) The quality of the ideas as judged by independent raters
(3) The number of negative verbalizations within the brainstorming groups (e.g., "This is a stupid idea. It won't work.")
(4) The valence of the negative verbalizations (e.g., "This is the dumbest idea that I have ever heard" has a stronger negative valence than "This idea is somewhat weak.")
(5) The overconfidence displayed by the group members when asked how they think they performed compared to other similar groups.
Prior to reading on, take a moment to jot down your predictions. Let's see how well you did.
Our posited hypotheses were overwhelmingly supported. Specifically, the individualists produced many more ideas; they produced more negative verbalizations; the valence of their verbalizations was more negative; and they displayed greater overconfidence. The only metric on which the collectivists scored higher (albeit only marginally so) was in the quality of the ideas produced. This is in line with another important cultural trait that some collectivist societies (e.g., those from the Far East) are known to possess namely being reflective (i.e., "Think before you act").
This study is about to be submitted for publication. I have asked Mark Cleveland, one of my former graduate students and currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario, to come on board. I will let you know once the paper is hopefully accepted for publication.
Source for Image:
http://www.weblo.com/asset_images/large/creativity.com_479f886238...
