Faculty Sponsor, if applicable
Dr. Ralph Eber
Project Abstract
This study examined the impact of social inclusion and exclusion on two different types of creativity: relational and referential (Ijzerman et al., 2014). Relational creativity requires people to identify and forge conceptual relationships among existing stimuli (Kray et al., 2006). Referential creativity involves disconnecting from prior knowledge (Ijzerman et al., 2013) and relies on divergent thinking, which facilitates broader thinking and generation of novel, loosely associated ideas (Guilford, 1959). All participants completed the study via Qualtrics. They were randomly assigned to one of three social inclusion/exclusion conditions. We asked them to describe the last time they felt included (inclusion condition), excluded (exclusion condition) or what they ate for breakfast (neutral condition). Next, participants completed two creativity tasks - a Remote Associates Test (RAT; Kray, 2006) to measure relational creativity and a product naming task (Ashton-James & Chartrand, 2009) for referential creativity. Our results show that being excluded made people perform worse on the referential task, while exclusion improved performance on the relational task.
Type of Research
Department Honors, Doctoral-Undergraduate Opportunity for Scholarship (DUOS)
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Presentation Year
5-17-2021