How the evaluation of recent experience constrains creative activities

Abstract

The current experiment examined constraints on creativity caused by perceived beliefs about the source of examples. Participants were shown three experimenter-provided examples which were depicted as having been generated by high-credibility (e.g., expert) versus low-credibility (e.g., novice) sources. In a generative task, participants created novel entities corresponding to one of two different topical domains. Conformity to features common among the examples was greatest when participants believed that the examples were created by highly credible sources. The results are discussed in terms of the levels of abstraction approach (Ward, 1995) to creative generation tasks.