How Awareness of the End of Life Impacts Creativity Haiyang Yang, INSEAD, France Amitava Chattopadhyay, INSEAD, Singapore
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH Labovitz School of Business & Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth, 11 E. Superior Street, Suite 210, Duluth, MN 55802 How Awareness of the End of Life Impacts Creativity Haiyang Yang, INSEAD, France Amitava Chattopadhyay, INSEAD, Singapore We show that mortality salience inhibits access to divergent information in memory, hampering creative ability. We further show that, contrary to the lay intuition that individuals with high internal locus-of-control are more creative problem solvers in dire situations, these individuals’ creative ability is impaired the most under mortality salience. [to cite]: Haiyang Yang and Amitava Chattopadhyay (2012) ,"How Awareness of the End of Life Impacts Creativity", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 40, eds. Zeynep Gürhan-Canli, Cele Otnes, and Rui (Juliet) Zhu, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 213-218. [url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/1012703/volumes/v40/NA-40 [copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/. Creativity at Different Times in Life Chairs: Haiyang Yang, INSEAD, France Amitava Chattopadhyay, INSEAD, Singapore Paper #1: Creativity and Aging: Positive Consequences of gation, how the designs of fashion designers—who are at the prime Diminished Inhibitory Control of their creative careers—evolve over time. Refuting the notion that Stephanie M. Carpenter, University of Michigan, USA iconic fashion designers are independent creative visionaries, the Carolyn Yoon, University of Michigan, USA researchers show that the designs by fashion designers themselves and their competitors in prior years significantly affect the designers’ Paper #2: Why Some Children Move and Groove So Well: A creativity and designs in the current year. Each presenter will have 15 Look at Creative Performance and Theory of Mind minutes to present their project, leaving 15 minutes for discussions Lan Nguyen Chaplin, Villanova University, USA between the presenters and audience. Michael I. Norton, Harvard Business School, USA This special session contributes substantively to the theme of the Paper #3: How Awareness of the End of Life Impacts Creativity ACR 2012 conference—appreciating diversity. The session brings Haiyang Yang, INSEAD, France together creativity researchers from different parts of the world, who Amitava Chattopadhyay, INSEAD, Singapore have explored the impact of time and age on creativity in different Paper #4: How Fashion Designers Develop New Styles: Creative contexts involving participants from a diverse range of age, demo- Epiphany Versus Market Feedback graphic, and cultural groups. The four presentations highlight a wide Joseph C. Nunes, University of Southern California, USA range of theoretical perspectives on creativity and yield implications Xavier Drèze, UCLA, USA for consumers, firms, and society. Through the session, we hope to Paola Cillo, Bocconi University, Italy bring consumer researchers’ attention to creativity research, initiate Emanuella Prandelli, Bocconi University, Italy discussions on a wide set of factors that impact creativity, and spark Irene Scopelliti, Carnegie Mellon University, USA future research on creativity in consumer contexts. Finally, this ses- sion would appeal to a diverse range of consumer researchers, such SESSION Overview as those interested in creativity, fashion and design, aging, cogni- From the zealous adoption of innovative products to the wide- tion, memory, motivation, developmental psychology, and mortality spread passion for do-it-yourself goods, today’s consumers not only salience. value creative aspects of the goods they consume but also enjoy en- gaging in creative activities themselves (Dahl and Moreau 2007). To Creativity and Aging: Positive Consequences of win the hearts of these consumers and thrive in a competitive global Diminished Inhibitory Control market, firms have to constantly innovate and develop creative prod- ucts and services. Thus, understanding psychological processes un- EXTENDED ABSTRACT derlying creative ingenuity is important for both consumer satisfac- Consumers of all ages often make decisions about products and tion and corporate success (e.g., Burroughs and Mick 2004; Moreau services in complex and busy consumption environments. In such and Dahl 2005). The purpose of this proposed special session is to environments, consumers have to ignore or inhibit a vast amount of interest and attract more consumer researchers to this domain, by distracting information in order to make more effective and satisfy- presenting a diverse set of recent research findings on people’s cre- ing choices. One theory of information processing suggests that as ativity at different times in life, and by fostering a discussion of po- people age, they become more vulnerable to the effects of distracting tentially interesting questions regarding theoretical developments in information due to normal age-related declines in inhibitory control this domain, thereby sparking future research. (Hasher, Zacks, and May 1999). While this has typically been dis- The four papers in this proposal each discusses creativity in a cussed as a negative feature of normal cognitive aging, the current different stage of life. In the first presentation, Carpenter and Yoon line of research seeks to investigate positive outcomes associated show that while aging has long been thought to negatively affect cog- with vulnerability to distraction. Past research suggests that distract- nitive ability, it can facilitate creativity performance. This effect is ing information can prime older adults with concepts that improve driven by the elderly’s vulnerability to distracting information. Fur- performance on the Remotes Associates Task (RAT; Kim, Hasher, ther, young individuals who are more vulnerable to distractions are and Zacks 2007). Better performance on the RAT is thought to be also more creative. The second presentation by Chaplin and Nor- associated with cognitive flexibility and convergent thinking. In ad- ton focuses on children, 3-12 years in age, and shows that younger dition, research on creativity suggests that when the goal is complex, children are more creative than their somewhat older counterparts: such as a creative or artistic goal, divergent thinking is enhanced, in Younger children (ages 3-6) are more likely to exhibit creative, care- part, by an attention to distracting (and often seemingly irrelevant) free behaviors than older children (ages 7-12) because the develop- information (Kasof 1997). ment of children’s ‘Theory of Mind’ increases their sensitivity to The present line of research seeks to merge the separate litera- criticism from others. tures on inhibitory processes and on creativity by investigating how In the third presentation, Yang and Chattopadhyay show that greater disinhibition of seemingly distracting information can en- awareness of the end of life inhibits diverse exploration of ideas and hance performance on subsequent tasks requiring divergent thinking. impairs creativity, and that locus-of-control moderates this effect— We hypothesize that enhanced vulnerability to distracting informa- while high internal locus-of-control individuals can be more creative tion will lead to greater creativity in both young and older adults. problem solvers in many situations, their creative ability is inferior We reason that a difficult inhibition task will cause features of the to those with moderate levels of locus-of-control under mortality sa- distracting information to remain activated and enhance performance lience. Finally, in the fourth presentation, Nunes, Drèze, Cillo, Pran- on an unrelated creativity task. In two studies we test our hypothesis delli, and Scopelliti examine, through a large scale empirical investi- Advances in Consumer Research 213 Volume 40, ©2012 214 / Creativity at Different Times in Life that difficulty in inhibiting distracting information leads to the gen- suggest one context in which greater vulnerability to distraction may eration of more original recipe ideas. actually be beneficial. Study 1: One hundred and ninety-four undergraduates (mean age = 19; 93 females) at the University of Michigan were recruited Why Some Children Move and Groove So Well: A Look to participate in a study on reading comprehension. Participants at Creative Performance and Theory of Mind were randomly assigned into one of two distraction conditions, or a control condition. All participants read a mundane passage about EXTENDED ABSTRACT a person going on a regular trip to the grocery store. Participants in Chaperoning a middle school dance – with girls and boys in the control condition read the passage in italicized font without any their early teens slouched against the bleachers, carefully monitoring distracting information. Participants in the first distraction condi- their peers and refusing to dance despite the booming music – in- tion were asked to read the italicized passage with irrelevant food evitably leads adults to comment: “Why aren’t they dancing?” This related words (e.g., avocado, chicken) periodically embedded in up- refusal to dance is particularly notable because many of these same right font. Their task was to “read all of the italicized words” in the children, just a few years earlier, were prone to dance, sing, and more passage. In the second distraction condition,