Take Time to Think Like a Kid

Everyone has seen the creative ideas that children come up with in their play and in everyday life.  One day we all thought that creatively, but as we get older and mature into adults, our thinking becomes more goal-directed and rigid, causing us to lose much of our playfulness and creativity.  It has been shown that as children go through the various stages of development their “creative productions” shift from being spontaneous to rule-bound and logical.  But creativity can be a useful skill for older children and adults, and it is important for us to understand what causes us to lose creativity with age and whether we can artificially regain it.  Zabelina and Robinson sought to do this in their 2010 study of creativity and a child-like mindset.  They recruited college students to participate in a study that they were told would involve a writing exercise and several other short activities.  When the participants arrived they were told to imagine that school was cancelled for the day and to write in as much detail as possible what they would do with their day.  In the experimental condition, the phrase “You are seven years old” was added to the instructions in order to put the participants in a child-like mindset.  Once the participants had written for seven minutes they were stopped and given a test of creativity called the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA), which measures both fluency of creativity (the total number of relevant responses) and originality (the number of responses that are unique).  After this, Goldberg’s broad-bandwidth trait scales were administered to measure the personality traits of openness to experience (a predictor of creative thought) and extraversion (higher levels are associated with playfulness and spontaneity).  Finally, mood was assessed using two seven-point scales ranging from positive to not positive and negative to not negative.      

       

The researchers hypothesized that the participants who thought of themselves as children would have increased creative originality due to the fact that younger children show more originality, but not increased creative fluency, because this is based on brain structures that change in adulthood.  They also thought that people who were less extraverted, and therefore less spontaneous, would show more creativity in the experimental condition (more extraverted people tend to be more creative to begin with, so the child-like mindset would not affect them as much).  However, they thought that openness to experience would be a predictor of creativity regardless of which condition the participant was in.  Also, they believed that the manipulation would have no effect on mood.  All of their hypotheses were supported by their results.  Additionally, writing prompt responses from students in the 7-year-old condition were more focused on desires and play while the responses from the adult condition were more focused on responsibilities and obligations.

There are three possible explanations for the reduction in creativity as people become adults.  First, the areas of the brain that control rule-based behavior develop slower than some other areas, so they don’t become fully influential until adulthood.  Second, many educational practices are focused on getting children to do well on standardized tests, which requires problem-focused thinking and allows for very little play, which can decrease creativity.  The third explanation is supported by the current study, and says that a child’s mindset sees tasks in terms of play, while an adult’s mindset is focused on problem-solving.  Previous studies have shown that mindsets are flexible, so manipulating a child-like mindset can increase creativity.  This study manipulated child-like mindset and it provides support that changes in creativity may be due to changes in task mindset rather than brain structure or education practices.

These results also provide support that creativity can be nurtured and improved because the move away from creativity is not permanent and unchangeable.  This cultivation of creative thought could be implemented in schools by allowing for more play and spontaneity, rather than a pure focus on problem-solving and concrete thinking for tests.  Creativity could also be enhanced in the workplace by utilizing guided imagery to enable a child-like mindset, games, and other interventions focused on desires rather than obligations.  All of these tactics may be able to improve innovation in businesses.  It is also possible that increasing playfulness and utilizing child-like mindsets could be beneficial because creativity is linked to improved psychological well-being.  Obviously there are a number of benefits to getting in touch with our “inner child” and it certainly couldn’t hurt for us all to think like our younger selves once in awhile, especially when we are having a creative block.

-Debra Gladwin