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Creativity and Perspective: Effects of Incubation and Perspective on Creative Idea Generation

Last registered on October 23, 2018

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Creativity and Perspective: Effects of Incubation on Divergent Thinking
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0003374
Initial registration date
October 02, 2018

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
October 03, 2018, 2:24 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated
October 23, 2018, 4:33 PM EDT

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
University of Cambridge

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
University of Cambridge
PI Affiliation
Rollins University

Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2018-10-30
End date
2018-10-31
Secondary IDs
Abstract
This study explores how well individuals perform in creative tasks when being asked to think in terms of themselves/others/in general. Further, this study explores how creative performance is affected by financial incentives.

This study focuses on the aspect of the creative process called 'incubation,' which means that participants will be introduced to the creative task, then interrupted and given a period of time (an incubation period) to wait before doing the task again. The final task results are the focus of the study.

In a randomized controlled trial, participants will be asked to perform a creativity task under different perspectives (others/self/in general) and under different incentive schemes (financial incentive, control). after performing the task, participants will be given a period of time to fill in questions and perform a menial task. After this period of time, participants will perform the creativity task again. This second performance is what we will consider for our dependent variable.

We expect our results to show that companies who want to encourage innovation in their employees should focus on the perspective their employees’ daily tasks induce in them.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Ebert, Charlie, Raghabendra KC and Jaideep Prabhu. 2018. "Creativity and Perspective: Effects of Incubation on Divergent Thinking." AEA RCT Registry. October 23. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.3374-2.0
Former Citation
Ebert, Charlie, Raghabendra KC and Jaideep Prabhu. 2018. "Creativity and Perspective: Effects of Incubation on Divergent Thinking." AEA RCT Registry. October 23. https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/3374/history/36121
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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Intervention Start Date
2018-10-30
Intervention End Date
2018-10-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Creativity as measured through Guilford's Alternative Uses Task (total number of uses generated)
Consensual assessment of creativity as measured by 2 raters (1-10 from low to high creativity)
Criterion for creativity based off the article: Silvia, Paul J., Beate P. Winterstein, John T. Willse, Christopher M. Barona, Joshua T. Cram, Karl I. Hess, Jenna L. Martinez, and Crystal A. Richard (2008), “Assessing creativity with divergent thinking tasks: Exploring the reliability and validity of new subjective scoring methods.,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2 (2), 68.
two raters will rate the ideas generated. The ratings for each idea will be averaged to create an average creativity score for each idea. Then the ideas that correspond to each individual will be averaged to get a participant creativity score.

We will also measure creativity by the standard measure of total number of ideas generated.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Our first measure is simply the total number of uses generated by each participant.
Our second measure is the consensual assessment between at least two raters on the creativity of the ideas generated. raters will be asked to rate each generated use for an item on a scale of one to ten, and will be told that creativity is made up of three components (uncommonness, remoteness, and cleverness) as used in the below reference.

Silvia, Paul J., Beate P. Winterstein, John T. Willse, Christopher M. Barona, Joshua T. Cram, Karl I. Hess, Jenna L. Martinez, and Crystal A. Richard (2008), “Assessing creativity with divergent thinking tasks: Exploring the reliability and validity of new subjective scoring methods.,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2 (2), 68.

the two raters' ratings will be averaged to get a creativity score for each generated idea.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
We are measuring perspective taking, prosocial motivation, and intrinsic motivation as well. We expect to see people in the 'others' perspective to have a higher amount of perspective taking than those in teh others or general group when they do the alternative uses task. We expect intrinsic motivation not to be affected by the perspective manipulations, however, we do expect the financial incentive to positively affect intrinsic motivation. We also don't expect the prosocial motivation to be affected by either of the manipulations (perspective or financial incentive)

Intrinsic, prosocial, and perspective taking scales were adapted from the paper: Grant, Adam M. and James W. Berry (2011), “The necessity of others is the mother of invention: Intrinsic and prosocial motivations, perspective taking, and creativity,” Academy of management journal, 54 (1), 73–96.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
This study uses a 3X2 between-subjects factorial design. There are two interventions:
(1) The manipulation of perspective during habit formation (others/self/general)
(2) The type of incentive given during creativity tasks (financial incentive/no incentive)
Experimental Design Details
Participants will respond to an MTurk survey, which will give them two minutes to come up with as many alternative uses for an object as possible. They will be asked to generate alternative uses under three different perspectives :

Perspective Treatment 1
Please give alternative uses for this item: piece of paper
Give as many as possible in the time limit
Respond using this Proper Response Format: A(n) [item] can be used [use]. Example: A piece of paper could be used as a painting pallet, to mix colors on

Perspective Treatment 2
Please give alternative uses for this item: piece of paper
Give as many as possible in the time limit
Respond using third person, describing how others (not yourself) could use the item
Proper Response Format Example: A painter could use a piece of paper as a painting pallet, to mix colors on.

Perspective Treatment 3
Please give alternative uses for this item: piece of paper
Give as many as possible in the time limit.
Respond using first person, describing how you personally could use the item
Proper Response Format Example: I could use as a piece of paper as a painting pallet, to mix colors on.

During the 2 minute excursive, half of the participants will also receive a financial incentive. The financial incentive will be an extra $1 for each item they generate that scores above 6 for its average creativity rating according to post-study judges. The other half of participants will receive no incentive.

Inclusion/exclusion
This study will be done over M Turk. We will recruit English speakers who are members of the M Turk community. As of right now, there are no other exclusion criteria.

Post-study data exclusion criteria
Participants will have had to have given at least one answer to all the alternative uses tasks to be included.
They will have to have signed the consent form.
When reviewing the answers, participant answers will need to be in the proper format requested (each perspective condition asks for responses to be in a specific sentence format). Those that are not in the proper format will be excluded.
One researcher will look at the answer and discern whether the participant thought of the piece of paper as the item that was requested (for example, thinking of a golf club as the metal stick, rather than as a social club people go to to play golf). those who answered according to the wrong concept of the item will be removed from analysis.
Randomization Method
Randomization is done through the qualtrics platform, which allows for randomization within its coding. Participants will be randomly and evenly distributed into the different conditions.
Randomization Unit
individual
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
180 individuals
Sample size: planned number of observations
180 individual
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
30 individuals within each treatment and control
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Criterion for significance is .05. Power against alternative hypothesis is conventionally .80, but we would like .95 Ideally 33 individuals in each of the six condition groups, with an ideal total of 200 participants. The test will be two-tailed.
Supporting Documents and Materials

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IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
IRB Approval Date
IRB Approval Number
Analysis Plan

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Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials