The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire but Reject Creative Ideas (2010) [pdf]

http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1457&context=articles

by tjalfi • 9 years ago

105 41 9 years ago

digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu

lemuurd• 9 years ago

remember this next time your coworkers shoot down your next great idea.

jschwartzi3• 9 years ago

The lesson here is really that if you want your brilliant idea to be taken seriously you need to mitigate the risks and limit the uncertainty before you even present it.

anigbrowl5• 9 years ago

For which you frequently need a budget. How about just changing the power structures or decision making process? The best way to do that is to open it up to a wider pool of voters.

kwhitefoot• 9 years ago

Double spaced text is so irritating to read.

Are there any services or browser addons that will convert pdfs to web pages? Then I could apply my own style sheet and correct some of that.

gwern• 9 years ago

The double-spaced is because this is a draft/preprint and not the final version; it makes it easier to copyedit and modify before the final layout. You can of course read the final version instead with normal typesetting: http://journals.sagepub.com.sci-hub.bz/doi/pdf/10.1177/09567...

jacobolus• 9 years ago

The double spacing is also (mainly?) because the formatting dates from an era of manuscripts typed on a manual typewriter, with a single choice of fixed-width (large) font, and a fairly limited ability to make generous margins. In such a context having blank lines is the easiest way to give proofreaders a place to write comments and corrections. The typewriter legacy is also how we get two spaces for new sentences, and outrageously wide half-inch paragraph indentation, with indentation even for the first paragraph of new sections.

It’s in my experience just as easy to write notes and corrections on documents which are written in smaller type with standard amounts of leading in a reasonable-width text block, with generous margins. And it’s much easier to read such documents.

Unfortunately, since the typewriter format was standard at the time when computers started to be used for manuscripts (and school assignments, and theses, and legal documents, etc.), it just got copied over for computer-prepared documents, so we ended up with a standard of a 7.5" wide single column of 12 point type, double spaced. Microsoft enshrined the 12 point size, 1 inch margins, half-inch tab stops, Times New Roman typeface, etc. as defaults in Word, and now all kinds of document specifications are stuck limping along with forced ugly semi-legible formatting.

Animats• 9 years ago

Evaluating creative ideas is hard. That's the big problem. Generating creative ideas that are hard to test is a huge headache for organizations.

killjoywashere• 9 years ago

That's the big problem.

I disagree. I have been working on a self-evidently great idea for over 5 years. Even now, with millions joyfully invested by a collaborator, incredibly good PR optics, and success on all fronts, a significant group of internal leadership hates it.

For a non-trivial set of great ideas, it's not even jealousy of the idea. It's jealousy of the subordinate's time and position. Who the hell let that pion have an idea and then let them work on it?

dreamcompiler• 9 years ago

Parent and GP are both right. Evaluating creative ideas is hard for the same reasons evaluating competence is hard. The people doing the evaluating (and making funding decisions) tend to be less creative and less technical than the people they're evaluating, so they fall back to criteria they understand: Do I like this person? Does my boss like them? Is he/she in the group that is expected to be creative, or are they in the "interchangeable cog" group?

Successful creativity is always political. If you suck at politics, it's hard to be creative.

Terr_• 9 years ago

Is a pion a very small peon? :p

Xcelerate• 9 years ago

It would be interesting to scan HN for startups that launched years ago and evaluate the sentiment of the comments. Then, group the startups into "successful" and "unsuccessful" and see how user sentiment at the time of the launch matches up with the startup's level of success. Would there be a trend?

kansface• 9 years ago

My guess is that sentiments are almost always negative on average and do not strongly correlate to outcomes. Its very easy to pick a reason why any startup will fail, and 99/100 times, the average reason is correct.

5thaccount• 9 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 is a great example (spoiler alert: DropBox)

ouid• 9 years ago

How do they know the bias is "against" novelty? In order to make this claim you would have to know the probability that an idea is good given that it is novel.

andreasgonewild3• 9 years ago

Word. Anything out of the ordinary will be shot down asap to protect the egos involved. Social Darwinism; it's all one big competition these days, and in a competition you either win or loose.

Angostura2• 9 years ago

That doesn't appear to be what the research is suggesting. From this, it's not about ego, it's about the fear of uncertainty.

andreasgonewild3• 9 years ago

Research, smesearch; fear is a product of ego. And so is crawling on your knees for authorities to tell you how the world works...

anigbrowl5• 9 years ago

Same thing. Nobody wants to look stupid if they're wrong.

bluetwo• 9 years ago

From a meeting last year: "We want to come up with creative ways to present this information, but we don't want to spend any time on things we won't end up using."

For me, that says it all about the bias against creativity.

Creativity requires a tolerance for uncertainty and risk. Don't ask for creativity unless you are willing to accept that.

heymijo• 9 years ago

I live this ad nauseam in education. Legislators, administrators, and boards often say they want creativity (or innovation). Yet there is almost no tolerance for (or even awareness?) of what it takes.

My purview in education is broad and the sentiment is always "what will go wrong" and never "what could go right." In higher education it's this mentality amplified.

You might say HN is my safe space.

cousin_it• 9 years ago

I'd even say that creativity requires waste, or at least a kind of attitude where wastefulness is okay.

vtange• 9 years ago

Can confirm this. In a lot of design schools (I went into architecture school) students are taught to iterate, iterate, iterate to improve and refine on their design. It's very rare to see great designs 100% complete on the first try, and often you see early models and prototypes tossed to the side after the final product is due.

From the short-term, economic perspective, watching someone hammer away at something when "tried-and-true" solutions exist (with some 'creative' twists ofc) can even seem irrational and wasteful. One famous Modernist architect, Phillip Johnson, even quipped that,"Architecture is the art of how to waste space."

People who can't handle the waste in design probably would never shell out for proper R&D or scientific developments either. Hardly anyone gets it right on their first try, even in research.

It's funny because when creative endeavors finally pay off, they can pay off big and then they themselves become the "tried-and-true" trend that people follow.

pimmen89• 9 years ago

Absolutely. If you're not "wasting" time and resources, you aren't trying ideas that could be proven completely wrong, a.k.a. new ideas.

AndrewKemendo• 9 years ago

people can hold a bias against creativity that is not ne cessarily overt, and which is activated when people experience a mot ivation to reduce uncertainty.

Translated: When people actually try something new and it gets tough, they get scared, give up and go back to the same old way of doing things.

lngnmn• 9 years ago

Because vast majority of these creative ideas belongs to category of a naive popular bullshit like "chakras", "tantric sex", "veganism" or a border wall with Mexico?

thegayngler• 9 years ago

People say they want creativity but they only really want it when they themselves are the source of the creativity. People want creativity for themselves but then want to shoot down everyone else's ideas so theirs can be the only one standing. I think the Silicon Valley has not been able to rid itself of this aspect of traditional corporate settings.

It feels like people are constantly in competition with others on their team and creativity suffers as a result. Lately, I have found myself giving people room to collaborate on (or do) things I would typically do myself. They can get satisfaction out of being a contributing part of the creative process. I also don't feel as though them being creative or succeeding is a failure on my part or a negative reflection on me.

reactor• 9 years ago

This is spot on from my experience.

YCode• 9 years ago

I thought Google's Project Aristotle [1] nailed the problem.

TL;DR: They propose two traits of an effective team. First, long term everyone speaks about the same amount even if the meeting to meeting amounts differ. Second, there is a general awareness among team members that if they take interpersonal risk (i.e. say something that may turn out to be wrong) they wont be embarrassed, rejected or punished.

And I think this paper's results fall in line with that train of thought. If "risky"/creative ideas are shot down on sight your sense of psychological safety and probably your average amount of talking is going to take a big hit over time.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear... (If you decide to read it the second half is the meat/results, the first is background info)

gosheroo• 9 years ago

New ideas take an effort to understand and most new things don't work or even if they do work they remain unadopted. Including apparently wonderful and well-developed ideas.

Come to thing of it we have only a partial understanding of the role of present technologies. In evolutionary terms, things persist for multiple reasons and we can't identify all of them. Small wonder we can't predict the future of technology and remain sceptical of implied claims to the contrary.

jtraffic• 9 years ago

The Atlantic did a piece on the bias against creative ideas[0], and provided a suggestion for overcoming resistance:

"Film producers, like NIH scientists, have to evaluate hundreds of ideas a year, but can only accept a tiny percentage. To grab their attention, writers often frame original ideas as a fresh combination of existing ideas. 'It’s Groundhog Day meets War of the Worlds!' Or 'It’s Transformers on the ocean!' In Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists also shift through a surfeit of proposals, the culture of the high-concept pitch is vibrant (Airbnb was once eBay for homes; Uber, Lyft, and Zipcar were all once considered Airbnb for cars; now, people want Uber for everything)."

Paul Graham gets credit for the 'x for y' format.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-new...

The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire but Reject Creative Ideas (2010) [pdf]

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