Doing Creative Things Helps You Switch Perspectives

Source: iStock photo by Jacob Lund licensed to Art Markman

Many important things you do in life require you to understand the world from someone else’s point of view. You cannot teach effectively if you are not aware of what other people know about the topic. You give better directions to someone if you can see the world from their vantage. You can craft more persuasive arguments if you see the perspective someone else is taking.

Clearly, there are individual differences in how skilled people are at taking someone else’s perspective. But are there things you can do to make yourself more likely to think about the world the way someone else does?

This question was addressed in a paper by Zheshuai Yang and Iris Hung in a paper in the February 2021 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They were particularly interested in the relationship between creativity and perspective taking.

The basic idea behind the link is that creativity involves divergent thinking—that is, you have to come up with many different ways of approaching a particular issue or problem. Developing those distinct ideas typically requires looking at objects and situations from multiple perspectives. So, engaging in creative thinking may get people in a mode of thinking about things from different vantage points. If so, then people who have engaged in creative thinking should be more likely to take someone else’s perspective than someone who has not.

The first study in this paper focused on individual differences. Participants filled out scales that measure the tendency to engage in creative activities. They were also given two tasks to perform. One involved deciding whether to donate to a charity. The assumption (based on previous research) is that seeing the world from the perspective of the people who would be helped by the charity would increase the likelihood of donating, so the prediction is that people who are more creative should be more likely to donate. The second task involved looking at a picture of a person facing the camera sitting at a table. Participants were asked a number of questions about the picture, but the key question involved stating the location of a book on the table. The book was on the left side of the picture from the perspective of the viewer, but on the right side of the table from the perspective of the person sitting at the table. The prediction for this task was that being more creative should make you more likely to identify the location of the book from the perspective of the person sitting at the table.

Both of these predictions were supported by the study.

Of course, there are many reasons why this kind of individual difference might occur. Subsequent studies asked people to engage in a creativity task (like coming up with multiple uses for a brick), a convergent thinking task (like stating the pattern depicted in pictures), or a neutral task that didn’t involve a lot of thinking. Then, participants engaged in versions of the donation or spatial perspective-taking tasks described earlier. Engaging in a creative thinking task increased rates of donation and the likelihood of identifying the location of the object from the other person’s perspective compared to both the convergent thinking task and the control task.

Still, the prediction is that people are better at taking someone else’s perspective after doing a creative task, and these studies don’t quite get at that mechanism. To push on this further, the researchers took advantage of an observation about donations. When a charity is collecting money for someone a lot like the potential donor, taking that person’s perspective makes it harder to get people to donate, because potential donors assume that they need the money just as much as the other person. But if the charity is collecting money for someone very different from the donor, then taking that person’s perspective increases donation.

In a few studies, the researchers varied the similarity of the target of the charity to the donor. For example, in a study involving young participants, the charity either helped young people or elderly people. In this study, participants in the creativity group were more likely to donate money to the charity for elderly people (who were different from them) than to the charity for younger people (who were similar to them). The convergent thinking and control tasks did not have a strong effect on the likelihood of donating to these charities.

These studies suggest that engaging in particular tasks (like doing something creative) can create a mindset that affects other things that you do at about the same time. While the effects of a particular creative task may be short-lived, the processes you engage in a lot set up habits that affect a lot of what you do.