
The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire but Reject Creative Ideas (2010) [pdf] - tjalfi
http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1457&context=articles
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bluetwo
From a meeting last year: "We want to come up with creative ways to present
this information, but we don't want to spend any time on things we won't end
up using."

For me, that says it all about the bias against creativity.

Creativity requires a tolerance for uncertainty and risk. Don't ask for
creativity unless you are willing to accept that.

~~~
cousin_it
I'd even say that creativity requires waste, or at least a kind of attitude
where wastefulness is okay.

~~~
vtange
Can confirm this. In a lot of design schools (I went into architecture school)
students are taught to iterate, iterate, iterate to improve and refine on
their design. It's very rare to see great designs 100% complete on the first
try, and often you see early models and prototypes tossed to the side after
the final product is due.

From the short-term, economic perspective, watching someone hammer away at
something when "tried-and-true" solutions exist (with some 'creative' twists
ofc) can even seem irrational and wasteful. One famous Modernist architect,
Phillip Johnson, even quipped that,"Architecture is the art of how to waste
space."

People who can't handle the waste in design probably would never shell out for
proper R&D or scientific developments either. Hardly anyone gets it right on
their first try, even in research.

It's funny because when creative endeavors finally pay off, they can pay off
big and then they themselves become the "tried-and-true" trend that people
follow.

~~~
hbosch
I went to a design school, and one of my early classes was traditional
drawing. Our professor would set up a still life, have us begin, and over the
course of weeks have "random" days where he would require us to erase
everything on the sheet and start over, no matter how good you were doing or
how far along you were. I think the lesson was heavy handed but I've always
remembered it... The idea, I believe, was "get used to throwing away your work
and trying new things, even when you don't want to".

In the end I think desensitizing yourself to the idea of erasing work is a
good practice. I have projects full of code that has been commented out for
over a month, simply because I'm afraid I'll have to go back and see it
again... Recalling this story, I may just as well delete it and rewrite it if
needed. Chances are the rewrite will be cleaner.

------
Xcelerate
It would be interesting to scan HN for startups that launched years ago and
evaluate the sentiment of the comments. Then, group the startups into
"successful" and "unsuccessful" and see how user sentiment at the time of the
launch matches up with the startup's level of success. Would there be a trend?

~~~
kansface
My guess is that sentiments are almost always negative on average and do not
strongly correlate to outcomes. Its very easy to pick a reason why any startup
will fail, and 99/100 times, the average reason is correct.

~~~
5thaccount
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)
is a great example (spoiler alert: DropBox)

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thegayngler
People say they want creativity but they only really want it when they
themselves are the source of the creativity. People want creativity for
themselves but then want to shoot down everyone else's ideas so theirs can be
the only one standing. I think the Silicon Valley has not been able to rid
itself of this aspect of traditional corporate settings.

It feels like people are constantly in competition with others on their team
and creativity suffers as a result. Lately, I have found myself giving people
room to collaborate on (or do) things I would typically do myself. They can
get satisfaction out of being a contributing part of the creative process. I
also don't feel as though them being creative or succeeding is a failure on my
part or a negative reflection on me.

~~~
YCode
I thought Google's Project Aristotle [1] nailed the problem.

TL;DR: They propose two traits of an effective team. First, long term everyone
speaks about the same amount even if the meeting to meeting amounts differ.
Second, there is a general awareness among team members that if they take
interpersonal risk (i.e. say something that may turn out to be wrong) they
wont be embarrassed, rejected or punished.

And I think this paper's results fall in line with that train of thought. If
"risky"/creative ideas are shot down on sight your sense of psychological
safety and probably your average amount of talking is going to take a big hit
over time.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-
lear...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-
its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html) (If you decide to read it the second
half is the meat/results, the first is background info)

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jtraffic
The Atlantic did a piece on the bias against creative ideas[0], and provided a
suggestion for overcoming resistance:

"Film producers, like NIH scientists, have to evaluate hundreds of ideas a
year, but can only accept a tiny percentage. To grab their attention, writers
often frame original ideas as a fresh combination of existing ideas. 'It’s
Groundhog Day meets War of the Worlds!' Or 'It’s Transformers on the ocean!'
In Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists also shift through a surfeit of
proposals, the culture of the high-concept pitch is vibrant (Airbnb was once
eBay for homes; Uber, Lyft, and Zipcar were all once considered Airbnb for
cars; now, people want Uber for everything)."

Paul Graham gets credit for the 'x for y' format.

[0] [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-
new...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-new-ideas-
fail/381275/)

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AndrewKemendo
_people can hold a bias against creativity that is not ne cessarily overt, and
which is activated when people experience a mot ivation to reduce
uncertainty._

Translated: When people actually try something new and it gets tough, they get
scared, give up and go back to the same old way of doing things.

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Animats
Evaluating creative ideas is hard. That's the big problem. Generating creative
ideas that are hard to test is a huge headache for organizations.

~~~
killjoywashere
> That's the big problem.

I disagree. I have been working on a self-evidently great idea for over 5
years. Even now, with millions joyfully invested by a collaborator, incredibly
good PR optics, and success on all fronts, a significant group of internal
leadership hates it.

For a non-trivial set of great ideas, it's not even jealousy of the idea. It's
jealousy of the subordinate's time and position. Who the hell let that pion
have an idea and then let them work on it?

~~~
dreamcompiler
Parent and GP are both right. Evaluating creative ideas is hard for the same
reasons evaluating competence is hard. The people doing the evaluating (and
making funding decisions) tend to be less creative and less technical than the
people they're evaluating, so they fall back to criteria they understand: Do I
like this person? Does my boss like them? Is he/she in the group that is
expected to be creative, or are they in the "interchangeable cog" group?

Successful creativity is always political. If you suck at politics, it's hard
to be creative.

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gosheroo
New ideas take an effort to understand and most new things don't work or even
if they do work they remain unadopted. Including apparently wonderful and
well-developed ideas.

Come to thing of it we have only a partial understanding of the role of
_present_ technologies. In evolutionary terms, things persist for multiple
reasons and we can't identify all of them. Small wonder we can't predict the
_future_ of technology and remain sceptical of implied claims to the contrary.

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ouid
How do they know the bias is "against" novelty? In order to make this claim
you would have to know the probability that an idea is good given that it is
novel.

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andreasgonewild
Word. Anything out of the ordinary will be shot down asap to protect the egos
involved. Social Darwinism; it's all one big competition these days, and in a
competition you either win or loose.

~~~
Angostura
That doesn't appear to be what the research is suggesting. From this, it's not
about ego, it's about the fear of uncertainty.

~~~
anigbrowl
Same thing. Nobody wants to look stupid if they're wrong.

~~~
Angostura
Ummm. No. Or is the only reason you're ever worried about things going wrong
down to your ego?

~~~
anigbrowl
If you want creative solutions, then pay the price which is having room to
experiment and sometimes fail. If you're not willing to give people the
resources they need then it's asking for all the benefit while undertaking
none of he risk, a strategy that is unlikely to be successful.

------
lemuurd
remember this next time your coworkers shoot down your next great idea.

~~~
jschwartzi
The lesson here is really that if you want your brilliant idea to be taken
seriously you need to mitigate the risks and limit the uncertainty before you
even present it.

~~~
anigbrowl
For which you frequently need a budget. How about just changing the power
structures or decision making process? The best way to do that is to open it
up to a wider pool of voters.

~~~
jschwartzi
What? Neither I nor GP were talking about elections, voting, or government.

~~~
anigbrowl
Neither am I. Businesses and departments therein have budgets, committees, and
so on. A flatter networked corporate structure where more employees can vote
on proposals may be better than pyramidal hierarchies.

Why you would assume I was talking about government is beyond me. This article
is literally discussing creative ideas being shot down by committees, and
committees conduct votes.

~~~
jschwartzi
I assumed you were talking about government because I have never heard of a
company "voting."

~~~
anigbrowl
Shareholders and boards of directors vote all the time, albeit with varying
degrees of impact. I'm astonished that you wouldn't know this.

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lngnmn
Because vast majority of these creative ideas belongs to category of a naive
popular bullshit like "chakras", "tantric sex", "veganism" or a border wall
with Mexico?

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kwhitefoot
Double spaced text is so irritating to read.

Are there any services or browser addons that will convert pdfs to web pages?
Then I could apply my own style sheet and correct some of that.

~~~
gwern
The double-spaced is because this is a draft/preprint and not the final
version; it makes it easier to copyedit and modify before the final layout.
You can of course read the final version instead with normal typesetting:
[http://journals.sagepub.com.sci-
hub.bz/doi/pdf/10.1177/09567...](http://journals.sagepub.com.sci-
hub.bz/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797611421018)

~~~
jacobolus
The double spacing is also (mainly?) because the formatting dates from an era
of manuscripts typed on a manual typewriter, with a single choice of fixed-
width (large) font, and a fairly limited ability to make generous margins. In
such a context having blank lines is the easiest way to give proofreaders a
place to write comments and corrections. The typewriter legacy is also how we
get two spaces for new sentences, and outrageously wide half-inch paragraph
indentation, with indentation even for the first paragraph of new sections.

It’s in my experience just as easy to write notes and corrections on documents
which are written in smaller type with standard amounts of leading in a
reasonable-width text block, with generous margins. And it’s much easier to
_read_ such documents.

Unfortunately, since the typewriter format was standard at the time when
computers started to be used for manuscripts (and school assignments, and
theses, and legal documents, etc.), it just got copied over for computer-
prepared documents, so we ended up with a standard of a 7.5" wide single
column of 12 point type, double spaced. Microsoft enshrined the 12 point size,
1 inch margins, half-inch tab stops, Times New Roman typeface, etc. as
defaults in Word, and now all kinds of document specifications are stuck
limping along with forced ugly semi-legible formatting.

~~~
slededit
Double spacing predates typewriters. It was common practice for typesetters to
use a wider space after punctuation. Typewriters merely emulated it albeit
crudely.

