Why do we hate creativity?

If you look around you, creativity is promoted and celebrated everywhere. We think highly of creative artists in music, the performing arts, or the fine arts. Businesses regularly mention creativity as part of the desired characteristics in job applicants (well, probably not when looking for an accountant, but otherwise…) and when asked about their attitudes toward creativity, people on average rate it highly and think of it as a positive personality trait.

Except once you start looking at how people behave, creativity is typically not rewarded in society and is sometimes punished. If we really valued creativity in music, jazz musicians would top the charts, and Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran would make a lot less money. If we really valued creativity in the arts, superhero movies would long have ceased to exist, and Andy Warhol would never have become a megastar artist.

Jennifer Mueller and her colleagues conducted two experiments on our attitudes toward creativity that shed light on the real-life issues with creativity.

First, they invited 73 participants into a lab and randomly split them into two groups. One group was told they would get a fixed payout at the end of the experiment, the other ones were told they would participate in a lottery that would decide if they got paid or not. Then all participants were explicitly asked to rate how much they value creativity, practicality, and other attributes in general. They were also asked to participate in an implicit attitude test where the researchers examined, how much people hesitated or how reluctant people were in associating positive attributes to creativity (similar to Harvard’s implicit attitude tests).

What they found was that everyone valued creativity when explicitly asked about their opinions. But in the implicit attitude test, things differed. The participants in the lottery group actively rejected creative ideas while the participants in the fixed payment group showed no bias against creativity. What happened was that the lottery created uncertainty in participants’ minds and that made them reject creativity more and stick more to the tried and tested solutions.

In a second experiment the researchers asked 140 participants to either write an essay on the subject “To every problem there is more than one correct solution” or an essay on the subject “To every problem there is only one correct solution”. Then all participants were again asked to fill out an explicit and implicit attitude test. Finally, the participants were presented with a creative new shoe design for a sneaker that used nanotechnology and had a lot of new materials and features.

The participants who were asked to write an essay on how every problem has only one correct solution generally rated the creativity of the newly designed shoe lower and rejected it more often than the people who were asked to write an essay about many correct solutions.

The lesson from these and similar experiments is a simple one: We appreciate creativity, but only after the fact and only once it has proven successful. In our daily lives, we are much more driven by uncertainty avoidance. Our lives are full of uncertainty and in our modern world, these uncertainties seem to be larger than in the past.

But evolution has programmed us to avoid uncertainty because while the payoffs may be high when things go well, things may end in death if they don’t work out as planned. ‘Better to be safe than sorry’ is much better for the gene pool than ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’. Hence, most people are intrinsically biased against creative solutions because these creative solutions are untested and thus increase uncertainty about future outcomes. And the more uncertain our environment is, the more we oppose creative solutions.

Which creates an important conundrum. As times become more uncertain, creative solutions to existing problems become more valuable to us as individuals, to businesses, or society because these solutions are more likely to effectively deal with new challenges. Yet, this is exactly when people become more risk-averse and reject creative solutions to reduce uncertainty.