How thinking for others can boost your creativity

Distancing ourselves from a problem can help us reach the solution

The next time you're struggling to solve a creative problem, try solving it for someone else. According to Evan Polman and Kyle Emich, we're more capable of mental novelty when thinking on behalf of strangers than for ourselves. This is just the latest extension of research into construal level theory, an intriguing concept that suggests various aspects of psychological distance can affect our thinking style.

It's been shown, for example, that greater physical and temporal distance lead us to think more abstractly, such that you're more likely to solve a problem if you imagine being confronted by it in a far-off place and/or at a future time (read Jonah Lehrer's take on what this says about the importance of holidays). Now Polman and Emich have shown that social distance can have the same psychological benefit.

Across four studies involving hundreds of undergrads, Polman and Emich found that participants drew more original aliens for a story to be written by someone else than for a story they were to write themselves; that participants thought of more original gift ideas for an unknown student completely unrelated to themselves, as opposed to one who they were told shared their same birth month; and that participants were more likely to solve an escape-from-tower problem if they imagined someone else trapped in the tower, rather than themselves (a 66 vs. 48 per cent success rate). Briefly, the tower problem requires you to explain how a prisoner escaped the tower by cutting a rope that was only half as long as the tower was high. The solution is that he divided the rope lengthwise into two thinner strips and then tied them together.

The researchers were careful to consider a range of possible confounding factors, including confidence in our knowledge of ourselves versus others, emotional involvement and feelings of closeness. None of these made much difference to the main result. On the other hand, among participants who tackled the tower problem, it was those who said afterwards that they felt the tower was further away, who tended to have found the solution. This reinforces the researchers' claim that solving a problem for a stranger is easier because of the feeling of psychological distance that it creates.

The study has some limitations - the participants didn't know who they were solving a problem for, other than that they were another student. When it comes to applying the lessons of this research to real life, it will surely make a difference who we think we're solving a problem for - be they a stranger, a relative or a manager. Future research could look at this.

'The practical implications of our findings are striking in the extent of their reach,' the researchers concluded with gusto. 'That decisions for others are more creative than decisions for the self is not only valuable information for researchers in social psychology, decision making, marketing, and management but also should prove of considerable interest to negotiators, managers, product designers, marketers, and advertisers, among many others.'
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Polman E, and Emich KJ (2011). Decisions for Others Are More Creative Than Decisions for the Self. Personality and social psychology bulletin PMID: 21317316

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For infants, walking is more than just another step in motor development

When an infant starts walking, this important achievement is more than just a milestone in motor control. According to Melissa Clearfield, the child's newfound locomotor skill arrives hand-in-hand with a raft of other changes in social behaviour and maturity. This is an unfolding, interactive process of development that before now has been little explored by psychologists.

Clearfield first had 17 non-walking infants (aged between 9 and 11 months) twice spend ten minutes exploring a 3m by 3m floor area dotted with toys, and with their mother and three other people positioned in each corner. The infants first explored the area crawling and then in a baby walker (this piece of equipment allows infants who can't yet walk to move around in an upright position as if walking).

The infants spent the same amount of time interacting with toys and people, gesturing and vocalising, whether they were crawling or in the baby walker. In other words, there wasn't anything about being in an upright position per se that changed the social behaviour of these children.

Next, Clearfield had a new group of 16 infants (also aged nine to eleven months) perform the same task, except these children were all walkers. These walking infants, even though they were age-matched to the first group, spent considerably more time vocalising and making socially-directed gestures, such as pointing at or waving a toy whilst looking at their mothers. Overall, the walkers spent three times as much time interacting with their mothers, and twice as much time interacting with the toys, compared with crawlers of the same age.

A final study tested another set of fourteen 9-month-old infants on the same exploratory task, once a month for six months, to see how their behaviour changed, not by virtue of their age, but rather according to whether they had yet learned to walk (onset of walking ability varied across the group, but all were walking by 15 months).

Irrespective of age, Clearfield found that infants gestured far more during their first walk session compared with their last crawl session, and that they interacted with their mothers more, and their toys less, during their first walk session compared with both their last crawl session and their second walk session.

By twelve months of age, eight members of this final infant group were walking, whilst six were still crawling. Comparing the walkers and crawlers revealed once again that the walkers interacted more with their mothers and performed more social gestures. 'This more mature mode of interaction did not come about through age or more experience in the world,' Clearfield said, 'but rather, the transition to independent walking itself changed how infants interact with others.'

The message is that the same developmental processes that lead an infant to take its first steps, also seem to drive changes in their social behaviour. Importantly, the baby walker study showed this isn't simply because of different opportunities afforded by being in an upright position. 'Under this explanation,' Clearfield concluded, 'processes such as perception, attention, memory, cognition, and social behaviours all shift to accommodate infants' new mode of moving through the world, and each process affects and is affected by the changes in the other processes. From this dynamic view, learning to walk becomes much more than simply a motor milestone; instead, it becomes the core of system-wide changes across many developing domains.'
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Clearfield, M. (2011). Learning to walk changes infants’ social interactions. Infant Behavior and Development, 34 (1), 15-25 DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2010.04.008

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