Evidence of muddy knowledge in reaching for the stars

This experiment examines people’s ability to invent creative outcomes to simple event sequences. We report a study where participants are given everyday event descriptions and asked to describe either a predictable outcome (Predictable group) or a creative outcome (Creative group). Following the Creative Cognition approach (Finke, Ward & Smith, 1992), we expected that though those instructed to be creative might generate novel and interesting outcomes, they would also be bound by their knowledge of the outcomes that typically occur. The results support this prediction, in that while the Creative group manifested more inventive variability in their outcomes relative to the Predictable group, their proposed outcomes still overlapped in part with those of the Predictable group. These results show that although creativity may take people beyond their knowledge, they can never fully break free from that knowledge