Merely recalling an adaptation experience boosts creative output

Evidence

In order to test the causal role of adaptation, we ran a final study in which we randomly assigned groups of undergraduate students at the Sorbonne in Paris (all of whom had previously lived abroad) to recall and write about a time they had adapted to a foreign culture, while other groups were asked to write about observing a foreign culture (which we reasoned was analogous to traveling abroad), learning a new sport, or a control condition with no prime. We then asked participants to draw aliens they might encounter on a strange planet (e.g., Kray, Galinsky, & Wong, 2006), which is an unstructured test of generative creativity. After having three independent coders evaluate the creativity of the aliens, we found that those participants primed with the adaptation experience drew aliens that were more creative than the ones drawn by those primed with the other experiences (see Figure 16.1). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2233

Categorization

• XREF: Mechanism parallel: passively observing the outgroup primes less than actively taking its perspective, echoing Allport’s contact-conditions emphasis on genuine engagement over mere proximity. — connects to: Adaptive problems reduce to reading imperfect environmental cues of two kinds. — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 31
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2233