Finding Creativity By Changing Perspectives.

Why do people fail to find creativity? A new possibility is that to find creativity, evaluators need to change perspective - go through a process of searching for and identifying a new perspective for understanding the idea. Three studies provide evidence that people tend to evaluate ideas as more creative if they spontaneously experienced (Study 1) or were induced to experience (Study 2) a change in perspective. Further, if people were induced not to experience a change in perspective, ideas were experienced as less creative (Study 3). These studies offer a novel mechanism to help explain a longstanding, yet unresolved puzzle: why do people desire but reject creative ideas? Evaluators can fail to find creativity in the process of assessing ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]