Where creativity resides: The generative power of unconscious thought☆
Introduction
Creativity has long been associated with the labor of the unconscious mind. Nobel laureates and famous artists, when probed to introspect on the process leading to their discoveries or creations, often emphasize the crucial role of the unconscious. The importance of some conscious activity notwithstanding, it is the unconscious that at some point produces the truly “creative” or unique thought. It seems that unique insights often results from a process whereby some initial conscious thought is followed by a period during which the problem is put to rest. Subsequently, after this period without conscious thought, a solution or idea presents itself. This stage during which one refrains from conscious thought and during which the unconscious is at work, is called incubation.
The goal of the present paper is to shed light on the relation between incubation and creativity. Creativity is a broad term and it should be noted that we do not use it to refer to all the intricacies of stellar achievements of geniuses such as Mozart or Einstein. Rather, we focus on one aspect of creativity: the generation of new and original thoughts. People do associate creativity with thinking the non-obvious and the original, and we hypothesize that such non-obvious or original thoughts are more likely to be elicited by incubation than by focused, conscious thought.
Whereas the anecdotal evidence for incubation is both spectacular and abundant (Claxton, 1997, Ghiselin, 1952, Koestler, 1964, Schooler and Melcher, 1995), for a long time incubation was hard to establish in the psychological laboratory. Moreover, the few scientific demonstrations that became available over the years were often hard to replicate (see Olton, 1979; for an early review). Part of the problem may have been that researchers investigating incubation usually used so-called insight problems. Such problems have only one specific and often counterintuitive solution, causing a “Eureka experience” once found. The choice for the use of such problems is understandable, as a sizeable portion of creative ideas that occur in real life are often characterized by such sudden insights. However, solutions to insight problems are sometimes very hard to find (true needles in haystacks, see Dijksterhuis, 2004) and the difficulty to obtain sound evidence may have been caused by the fact that the period of incubation experimental participants are given in a lab experiment is often very short compared to real life creativity. After all, sometimes creativity can take months or even years.
Still, in the past 15 years some evidence for incubation has been found (e.g., Bowers et al., 1990, Smith and Blankenship, 1989). Smith and Blankenship (1989) for instance, gave their participants various insight problems to solve. Some were quickly solved by the participants whereas others were not. Giving participants an immediate second go at the unsolved problems did not help. However, after a delay during which they were distracted and could not attend to the problems, participants’ performance improved. The reason distraction helped is that participants were given some misleading cues at the outset and distraction helped them forgot these misleading cues.
Schooler and Melcher (1995) reviewed the literature on incubation and concluded that distraction can lead to “set-shifting.” People often approach a problem with the use of wrong cues, wrong heuristics, and/or wrong information. A period of distraction makes that such wrong approaches become less accessible or are forgotten altogether. The effects of distraction on a change of mental set can be both strong (such as when one tries to solve a chess problem and initially gets truly “fixed” in thinking along a wrong line) and fairly subtle (such as when distraction attenuates the biasing influence of primacy or recency effects). Such processes can be grouped under the umbrella of the “a fresh look” explanation: putting a problem aside for a while allows for a fresh, unbiased new start.
There is no denying that putting a problem aside for a while indeed allows for a fresh start and that such a fresh start often helps. The question, however, is whether this is the sole benefit of a period of distraction. Explaining effects of incubation in terms of set-shifting suggests that the role of the unconscious is merely passive. Problems are solved because of the temporary absence of conscious thought, but the unconscious mind does not contribute anything to solve the problem. The term incubation suggests more though. It suggests that the unconscious also actively thinks and contributes to solving a problem (see also Claxton, 1997, Koestler, 1964).
There is some evidence for true “unconscious thought.” In experiments conducted by Bowers et al. (1990), participants were asked to guess a target word while they were given successive hints (words associated with the target words). Typically, participants are clueless for a while and then suddenly know the right answer. However, after carefully examining participants’ prior, wrong guesses, it was concluded that participants are slowly getting closer to the right answer. It may “feel” as if the answer is suddenly presented to consciousness, however, before the answer become conscious, the unconscious is clearly thinking about it. It is, as it were already approaching the target.
In addition, Dijksterhuis (2004) recently compared conscious and unconscious thought in the realm of decision making. In several experiments, participants received information about various alternatives (e.g., apartments, roommates) with the goal to decide what alternative is the most attractive. Participants either chose immediately after they received the information, or after a period during which they were allowed to consciously think about the various alternatives, or after a period of distraction. In this latter condition, participants were assumed to engage in unconscious thought. These unconscious thinkers consistently made the best decisions as judged from a normative perspective. Additional evidence indicated that the mental representations of the various alternatives changed during unconscious thought. They became more clear and more organized. In sum, not only did the unconscious think, but this thinking was more fruitful than conscious thought in that it led to better decisions.
Section snippets
Conscious versus unconscious thought
The aim of the present paper is to shed more light on the process of unconscious thought. To do this, unconscious thought will be compared to conscious thought (see Baars, 1997, Dijksterhuis, 2004). Furthermore, the comparison will be made with tasks that relate to creativity. In essence, the hypothesis under consideration is that whereas conscious thought is essentially convergent, unconscious thought is more divergent, and therefore probably also more creative.
This hypothesis is not only
Overview of the experiments
Three experiments were conducted and in all experiments three conditions were compared. Participants were instructed to generate a list of items, such as names of places beginning with a certain letter. In the immediate generation condition, which can be conceived of as a baseline, participants started right after receiving the instruction. In the conscious thought condition, participants were given three minutes to consciously think about the items before they are given time to list them.
Participants and design
Eighty-seven undergraduate students from the University of Amsterdam participated in the experiment. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: an immediate generation condition, a conscious thought condition, and an unconscious thought condition. They either received course credits or money (7€) for their participation.
Procedure and materials
The experiment was the last experiment in a longer session with multiple, unrelated experiments. During the experiment, participants worked in separate cubicles and
Participants and design
Forty-seven (2a) and seventy-two (2b) undergraduate students from the University of Amsterdam participated in the experiment. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: an immediate generation condition, a conscious thought condition, and an unconscious thought condition. They either received course credits or money (7€) for their participation.
Procedure and materials
Experiment 2a was exactly the same as Experiment 1 with two exceptions. First, participants were asked to list Dutch place names starting
Participants and design
One hundred and thirteen undergraduate students from the University of Amsterdam participated in the experiment. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: an immediate generation condition, a conscious thought condition, and an unconscious thought condition. They either received course credits or money (7€) for their participation.
Procedure and materials
The experiment was exactly the same as Experiment 1 with one exception. Participants were asked to list things one can do with a brick. No examples were
General discussion
The results of the present experiments show that conscious thought and unconscious thought are different modes of thought leading to different results. In the experiments, participants were requested to list items of a certain category and in all experiments, the output of conscious and unconscious thought differed. Conscious thought led to more items in line with a cue, whereas unconscious thought led to more items diverging from this cue (Experiment 1). Conscious thought led to more
On the nature of conscious and unconscious thought
The current as well as other findings (Dijksterhuis, 2004, Dijksterhuis and Bos, 2005, Dijksterhuis and van Olden, 2005) have led to the formation of the Unconscious and Conscious thought Theory (UCT; Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, in press). UCT is aimed at explaining psychological processes we associate with thought, such as decision making, choosing, impression formation, and creativity. It holds that there are two different modes to approach such psychological hurdles: conscious thought and
Conclusion
The findings reported here speak to the relevance of unconscious thought in general and to the relation between unconscious thought and creativity or divergent thinking. One could say that unconscious thought is more “liberal” than conscious thought and leads to the generation of items or ideas that are less obvious, less accessible and more creative. Upon being confronted with a task that requires a certain degree of creativity, it pays off to delegate the labor of thinking to the unconscious
References (20)
In the theater of consciousness
(1997)- et al.
Intuition in the context of discovery
Cognitive Psychology
(1990) Hare brain, tortoise mind: How intelligence increases when you think less
(1997)Think different: The merits of unconscious thought in preference development and decision making
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
(2004)- Dijksterhuis, A., & Bos, M. W. (2005). “I think about you when I should not” The dangers of conscious thought during...
- Dijksterhuis, A., & Nordgren, L. F. (in press). Struggling with thinking: The unconscious and conscious thought theory....
- Dijksterhuis, A., & van Olden, Z., 2005. To think or not to think, or to think unconsciously perhaps? Unconscious...
- et al.
The effects of promotion and prevention cues on creativity
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
(2001) The creative process
(1952)- et al.
Verbal working memory load affects regional brain activation as measured by PET
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
(1997)
Cited by (262)
Does unconscious processing benefit creative problem-solving, especially when people have been misdirected?
2023, Thinking Skills and CreativityThe vision of on-demand architectural knowledge systems as a decision-making companion
2023, Journal of Systems and SoftwareCitation Excerpt :However, based on an architect’s dispositional style and situational factors, ODAKS can use facets of assistive conversations to prime (i.e. a kind of nudging) his or her cognitive process, being intuition, rationality, or both: priming can be considered as positioning of information to nudge the subjects (Caraban et al., 2019). While the effects of priming on DM have not yet been empirically verified, we imagine the following priming steps: (a) By probing an architect’s dispositional style through the REI instrument (Dijksterhuis and Meurs, 2006), ODAKS may be able to detect whether an architect tends to rely on one or both, intuition and rationality cognitive processes; (b) With regard to context, ODAKS can collect decision situational factors such as the complexity of the problem, past experience of the architect in similar problems and solutions, or the stage of design in problem-solution co-evolution and with these contexts’ conjecture whether priming is beneficial. Based on both, dispositional style and contextual factors, ODAKS can potentially prime intuition and rationality respectively through practices such as (i) distraction and brainstorming (intuition), and (ii) design rationale, design reasoning techniques, and reflective questions (rationality).
Investigating Triple Process Theory in Design Protocols
2022, Proceedings of the Design SocietySome Effects of Sex and Culture on Creativity, No Effect of Incubation
2024, Empirical Studies of the ArtsEbb and flow: design fixation and creativity in professional groups
2024, Journal of Engineering Design
- ☆
This research was supported by NWO-Vernieuwingsimpuls 016.025.030.