How to Be Shifty: Creativity (Part 2)

Learning By Doing

You are the Creative Director of a boutique advertising firm, and you just landed a huge, new account. Your client is releasing a new carbonated beverage that features orange and vanilla. You have to come up with a new logo by the end of the week. Time is of the essence, so you crack your knuckles and get to work. Unfortunately, you hit a snag. None of your initial ideas are very creative. What do you do? How do you get "unstuck?"

Getting Philosophical: Ontological Trees

Before diving into some concrete advice, let's take a step back and talk about a fundamental way we make sense of the world, through ontologies. Ontologies are useful ways of organizing the world, psychologically speaking. For example, it is useful to distinguish between "things" and "events." Because things have a physical manifestation, they have dimensional properties such as height, length, depth, and weight. They can also be further sub-categorized as alive or inert; useful to humans or not; edible or poisonous; large or small; manmade or natural. How we describe physical objects is only bound by our creativity, and what we find psychologically useful.

Events differ from things because they have a different set of properties. Events take place in a specific location and have a finite duration (i.e., a starting and an end). Events usually have agents (e.g., ants, geese, or baseball players) and outcomes (e.g., building a colony, migrating south, or winning a game). 


So far, the ontological tree I've described only has two branches. We have a "things" branch and an "events" branch. How do we know if these two branches of our ontological tree are psychological distinct? To determine if they are separate, we can use a simple linguistic test. It is perfectly logical to say, "My car is blue;" however, you would rightfully worry about my psychological health if I said, "That baseball game is blue." We know that events and things are distinct because they have a non-overlapping set of properties that are specific to that branch of the ontological tree [1].


There are many ways to carve up the world, and Fig. 1 is a plausible, yet incomplete attempt [2]. A proper articulation of all the possible branches would take an incredibly long time. Instead, this tiny ontological tree is meant to clarify the case study in the next section.

Figure 1. A plausible, yet (woefully) incomplete ontological tree.

Shifting Takes Guts

Before the 1970s, most doctors assumed that the stomach was too acidic for bacteria to survive. If you went to your doctor complaining of a stomach problem, he or she would tell you that your stomach is producing too much acid, and that you need to figure out a way to reduce the acid production. Obviously, you would need to avoid eating certain foods, such as orange juice or overly spicy food. Your doctor would also tell you to avoid stressful situations because it was believed that stress increases the production of stomach acid.


In the late 1970s and early 1980s, this dogma was challenged by two physician researchers. Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren were interested in the etiology of peptic ulcers. They noticed that patients with ulcers had an unusually high number of bacteria (Helicobacter pylori) in their stomach. This, of course, went against wisdom of the day. For them, the correlation was too strong to ignore. 


Because the explanation at the time was so ingrained, Marshall and Warren had a difficult time convincing the medical field of the causal connection between H. pylori and peptic ulcers. In very dramatic (and highly publicized) fashion, Marshall infected himself with the bacteria, developed an ulcer, and then cured himself by taking an antibiotic. After this dramatic demonstration, the medical community was finally convinced [3].


Going back to our ontological tree, one could argue that, before the 1980s, the medical community believed that the cause of peptic ulcers was: Mental state…Emotion…Stress. However, to make their scientific discovery, Marshall and Warren had to shift across the ontological branches to: Things…Objects…Natural Kind…Animals…Bacteria. That's a highly creative shift, and one that certainly needs to be celebrated. In October of 2005, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery [4].

The S.T.E.M. Connection

What can peptic ulcers teach us about generating a creative logo for your client? My recommendation is to first identify an ontology that makes sense to you. Keep in mind that there may be domain-specific ontologies (e.g., a medical ontology). Then, try to situate your current position on that tree. Finally, look across the branches and ask yourself if there is a different way to frame the problem? Can you shift across the branches and search for a new solution there?


Here's an example that advice. Von Glitschka is the Creative Director/Illustrator of Glitschka Studios. Mr. Glitschka has produced several LinkedIn courses that teach how to design creative logos, and one method that he uses is called the "word association chart." At the center, you have your focal concept (e.g., orange vanilla soda). Then you apply different categories of words to your focus. For example, can you think of any puns or metaphors that are associated with vanilla beans and oranges? The word-association strategy is particularly insightful because analogies and metaphors are especially suited for helping people shift across ontological boundaries. For example, the metaphorical statement, Mary is going to blow her lid, is a mental state (i.e., anger) represented as a thing (i.e., steam) [5]. 

So, if you ever find yourself stuck, and you are looking for a creative solution, remember: Be shifty! 


Share and Enjoy!

Dr. Bob

Going Beyond the Information Given

[1] This description of an ontology might remind you of the representation we used of the concept whale in a previous post.

[2] Chi, M. T. H., & Hausmann, R.G.M. (2003). Do radical discoveries require ontological shifts? In L. V. Shavinina & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), International Handbook on Innovation (pp. 430-444).

[3] Thagard, P. (1998). Explaining disease: Correlations, causes, and mechanisms. Minds and Machines, 8(1), 61-78.

[4] From the Nobel Website: The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award  The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2005 jointly to Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren for their discovery of “the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease."

[5] For other fun examples of metaphorical language check out: Lakoff, G. (2008). Women, fire, and dangerous things. University of Chicago press.

Straight Outta Left Field: Creativity

Learning By Doing

Before we get started, grab something to write with and let's play a game. Here's a brick. Set a timer for 5 minutes and think of as many uses for this brick as possible. This is a safe space, so no bad ideas. Ready? Go wild!

"She's a brick...house." –The Commodores

How many ideas did you generate? Are any of them particularly creative? If so, how did you make that determination? How do you know if something is "creative" or not?

The game you just played is called the unusual uses task in the creativity literature [1]. The experimenter gives the participant a common object (e.g., a brick, paper clip, or knife) and asks the participant to generate as many uses for that object in a constrained amount of time. The experimenter then scores the ideas for their "unusualness." Since this task has been around for a long time, the experimenters have a fairly robust understanding as to what counts as "unusual" [2]. In this context, unusual is synonymous with creative. 

A more formal definition of Creativity has several components. First, for something to be creative, it must be unusual or atypical; however, it can't be so "out there" that it is incoherent, useless, or irrelevant. Second, it is almost always the case that the judgement of a "creative" solution is done by a field of experts in a domain. For example, I might think that using a brick as a door-stop is insanely creative. However, an expert will tell me that my idea has been done so many times before that they have lost count. Thus, for something to be considered "creative" it cannot simply be an incremental change to the status quo. Instead, it must move the field forward.

The Componential Model of Creativity

Now that we have a handle on the definition of creativity, it would be nice to have a model for how people generate creative work. If we had such a model, then we can potentially train people in each of the components so they can become more creative. As it turns out, there are a couple of models of creativity. The next four sections describe the Componential Model of Creativity [3]. It was first introduced by Teresa Amabile, one of the pioneers in the field of creativity research.

Domain-relevant Skills

The first component of the model is the development and acquisition of domain-relevant skills. The general consensus is that it takes 10 years of deliberate practice in a particular domain to become an expert [4]. A precursor for producing truly creative work is a huge warehouse of domain-relevant knowledge, including both declarative and procedural knowledge. To make a creative, novel contribution in a given area, you must first have an expert-level understanding of it.

Creativity-relevant Processes

In addition to an abundance of skills honed over time, the componential model suggests that having a set of creativity-relevant personality characteristics increases one’s capacity to be creative. For example, it helps if the individual can see connections between disparate ideas, sees the value in risk-taking, and does not succumb to authority. The creative individual is also able to fluently generate lots and lots of ideas, while also using her domain knowledge to select ideas that have potential. Finally, creative individuals have a "tolerance for ambiguity" in the sense that they can hold competing thoughts in their mind at the same time [5].

Task Motivation

The creative individual also has task motivation. In other words, a creative person has passion for their work. More specifically, they are intrinsically motivated to work on a challenging project. There seems to be a large amount of variation between individuals in terms of their motivation. For example, I might think that machine learning is the next best thing, but I could care less about the latest fashion trends. In other words, task motivation is largely a fit between the domain and a person’s interests.

The Social Environment

The previous components focus on the internal cognitive and motivation processes that operate within a person. The social environment is an interesting component of the model because it recognizes forces outside the creative individual. As stated in the introduction, a creative work is done within a domain, such as art, science, or engineering, and the field is comprised of other individuals who evaluate the creative output (e.g., art critics, fellow scientists, and other engineers). The social environment can both positively and negatively affect creativity. 

A shining example of an organization that fosters creativity is the design firm IDEO or the animation studio Pixar. Both organizations understand the importance of experimentation. IDEO’s mantra is, “Fail often in order to succeed sooner.”

The perfect example of a soul-crushing organization is Initech. In this fictitious company, the managers care more about enforcing arbitrary rules than letting their employees work on problems that interest them.

The S.T.E.M. Connection

You might be asking yourself, why is it important to study a model of creatively? The short answer is: If you can understand what factors influence creativity, then maybe you can teach people how to become more creative. According to the model, there are several entry points for educational intervention. For example, we know for a fact that we can teach domain-relevant skills. Our educational system is completely built around that goal. 


Teaching creativity-relevant skills could go either way. According to the model, there are some personalities that are more creative (i.e., those who take risks and question authority). We generally think that an individual is born with his or her personality, and it is difficult to change; however, there are strategies that have been developed to help train people to become more fluent in idea generation. If it is possible to teach brainstorming, then at least part of the domain-relevant skills can be taught. 


Task motivation may be a little more difficult to teach. Or it may not be amenable to training at all. Instead, I believe it is more about finding the right fit between the individual and his or her passions. Those who know what they are passionate about are lucky. For those who do not know, they may need extra guidance and other interventions to help them identify what gets them out of bed in the morning. 


Finally, as educators, we can structure the social environment so that it is conducive to creative thinking [6]. For example, we know that rigid deadlines and extrinsic rewards are a motivation killers. We also know that being overly critical, especially early in the creative process, can backfire tremendously. Thus, a creative space is one in which exploration, play, and failure are encouraged, and evaluation is withheld until the later parts of the creative process.


With the componential model of creativity in hand, it is my hope that we can expand each person's creative capacity. Now, if I could just figure out to do with this brick. 


Share and Enjoy!

Dr. Bob

Going Beyond the Information Given

[1] Beaty, R. E., & Silvia, P. J. (2012). Why do ideas get more creative across time? An executive interpretation of the serial order effect in divergent thinking tasks. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6(4), 309.

[2] Rumor has it that some employers use the unusual uses task to assess the creativity of job applicants. If you aspire to work for one of these companies, it might not be a bad idea to practice thinking of unusual uses for common objects because, as [1] suggests, later ideas are better than earlier ideas. This finding also suggests you can get better at generating novel uses for common objects with practice. 

[3] Amabile, T. (2013) Componential theory of creativity. In E. Kessler (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Management Theory (pp. 135-140). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

[4] Because of the time and energy required, it is an extremely rare individual who can make a creative contribution to more than one domain. They do in fact exist, and they go by the fun name of polymaths. 

[5] Tolerance for ambiguity also goes by the name Janusian Thinking, which I was first introduced to in the article: Rothenberg, A. (1996). The Janusian process in scientific creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 9(2-3), 207-231. Janus is the Roman god who had two faces. One looked toward the past, while the other gazed forward, into the future. 

[6] If design thinking is your jam, then Standard d.school has several materials to get your started, as does IDEO.

The Downside of Expertise: Part 1

Editorial Note: I am so excited about the next topic that I had to split it across two posts. For Part 1, I introduce the idea that, while expertise is great, there is a cost associated with it. In Part 2, I will talk about the origin of research on expertise and its educational implications. Let's jump in with a real mind scrambler!

The Backwards Brain Bicycle 

Grab a junky bike and pull the handlebars and stem out of the steerer tube. Next, weld one gear onto the steerer tube and another gear onto the stem (the stem is the piece connected to the handlebars). Once you're done, it should look like this:

Due to your modification, when you turn the handlebars to the right, the front wheel pivots to the left (and vice versa). Before you embark on your maiden voyage, what do you suppose will happen? If you're not sure, take a look at this fascinating video.

What happened to this poor engineer? Why did it take him eight months to learn how to ride his "backwards brain bicycle"? The answer to that question is related to why a softball pitcher can reliably strike out the best batters from Major League Baseball (MLB).

"Swing and a miss" --Harry Doyle

In MLB, there is a distance of exactly 60.5 feet between the pitcher's mound and home plate. When a pitcher throws a 95 mph fastball, the ball arrives in a little less than half a second (.43 seconds, to be precise). That means the batter needs to decide whether he should swing (or not) in about a quarter of a second. Otherwise, the ball will blow past him as he stands there and ponders whether he should swing. 

Because it truly is a split-second decision, the batter must look for an edge. One place to find an edge is to move upwards in the stream of events and find a reliable cue for swinging. One of the cues that batters use is the pitcher's grip on the ball. If they hold it with two fingers over the top, then it is a fastball. If they put more distance between their forefinger and the thumb, then it will be a curve ball. The other cue that batters look for is the spin on the ball, which transmits itself as a certain "color" of pitch. 

MLB players log thousands of hours behind the plate trying to hone their batting ability. In effect, they become experts in watching, categorizing, and reacting to a variety of different pitches. So if they truly are expert batters, then why can softball pitcher Jennie Finch strike out batting legends Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols? [1]

The explanation is fairly simple. Expertise is highly narrow. When faced with a typical softball pitch, MLB batters are watching for something that will never come. They've essentially wired their brain to perceive and react (without much conscious intervention, mind you) to a highly narrow band of stimuli. Because overhand pitches used in MLB tend to fall, the batter watches for a ball that starts high and gets pulled to the ground. A softball pitcher throws underhand, so the ball starts low and has the possibility of rising. They also are watching for the aforementioned cues of the pitcher's grip and the spin on the ball, but the grip that a softball pitcher uses is completely different. By changing the narrow band of stimuli that a batter is trained to read, you can essentially reduce and expert batter to a novice, or possibly even worse.

But let's stop talking about muscular expertise. What about conceptual expertise? Are there any hidden costs there?

Looking in All the Wrong Places

Another way in which expertise can steer a person wrong is by biasing her to look for solutions within the prescribed content area of her specialty. Consider the following experiment [2] where baseball experts were given a creativity test called the Remote Associates Test (RAT). Their job was to look at a list of three words and figure out what single word binds them together. There were multiple experiments and conditions in the original study, but the one relevant to the current discussion was between lists of words where the domain knowledge was relevant and applicable and a different list of words where the domain knowledge was irrelevant and misleading. 

To make this concrete, suppose you are a baseball expert, and I give you the following three words: 

Baseball-Relevant:     WILD     DARK       FORK

What word connects these three? A baseball expert might answer PITCH (e.g., wild pitch, pitch dark, and pitch fork). The word "pitch" comes straight out of baseball, and it is therefore relevant to the solution to this RAT problem. When solving baseball-relevant problems, baseball experts had an accuracy rate of about 38%. This was roughly the same accuracy rate among baseball novices, who identified the connecting word 40% of the time.

But then the experimenters switched things up and gave baseball experts and novices a list of words that seemed like they might be connected to baseball, but ultimately they were not connected. Here is an example: 

Baseball-Irrelevant:     PLATE     BROKEN       SHOT 

What single word connects these three [3]? The first two words seem to hint at HOME (e.g., home plate and broken home), but then HOME doesn't really go with the last word (what is a home shot or a shot home?). How do you think the experts did? Their performance plummeted. Their accuracy rate dropped by over half, to 15%. Baseball novices didn't show the same drop in their performance; in fact, they showed the same accuracy rate of 40% on the baseball-relevant and irrelevant tasks. 

What's going on? Why can't baseball experts suppress their knowledge? Even when the experimenters warned them that baseball knowledge was irrelevant, they still couldn't turn it off. They seemed to be biased towards looking for solutions that are aligned with topics that they know a lot about, which actually interfered with performance when the solution was not aligned with their area of expertise. What may also be surprising is that the experts, at least for this task, did not out-perform their novice counterparts. In my next post I will explore situations in which being an expert can help, or hinder, performance, depending on the task at hand.

That concludes Part 1 of The Downside of Expertise. Check back next week for the conclusion and the connection to education!

Share and Enjoy!

Dr. Bob

For More Information

[1] Why MLB hitters can't hit Jennie Finch and science behind reaction time. Sports Illustrated, Volume 119, Issue 4. (July 29, 2014) [link] [video]

[2] Wiley, J. (1998). Expertise as mental set: The effects of domain knowledge in creative problem solving. Memory & Cognition, 26 (4) 716-730.

[3] The word that binds PLATE, BROKEN, SHOT together is GLASS.

Covering the Spread: Spreading Activation

"Oh, rats!" —Indiana Jones

Let's play a game. What do the following three things have in common?   

blue       cake       cottage

One is a color, the second is a type of dessert, and the last is a little house in the woods. It doesn't seem like they have much in common. But there is one concept that binds them together. Keep thinking about it. Or don't! Sometimes the best way to see the connection between (seemingly) related things is to leave it alone and let your mind engage in some background processing.

Switching gears a moment...let's talk about what it means to be "reminded" of something. For example, I had lunch with one of my coworkers, and she told me about this man who randomly stopped by her house when she wasn't home, and he left some candy on her front porch. Her story reminded me of a movie that my wife and I recently watched about a guy who wants to be a freelance journalist. So wait a minute...What does a guy leaving candy at my friend's house have to do with a movie about journalism? Well, the movie is entitled Nightcrawler, and the connection I saw was "anti-social behavior" (or maybe even "mental illness!"). This type of thing happens all the time in conversation. Something one person says reminds another person about a completely different topic. How does that happen?

Back to the Network

One potential explanation is to return to an idea that was introduced in a previous post. I made the claim that an Associative Network is a very powerful way to represent someone's knowledge. It is powerful because it can explain other cognitive phenomena, such as "reminding." When we say something "reminds you" of something else, what are we talking about? And how can we use that information to map someone's knowledge?

One of the properties of a network is called the "connection strength" (or proximity) between two concepts (or nodes). For example, apples are strongly associated with bananas because they are both types of fruit. But apples are only very remotely associated with the Kentucky Derby. (It's a long walk, but you can imagine the following chain of associations: Horses eat apples, which give them energy to run, and people like to watch horses race at the Kentucky Derby.) 

That means something can remind us of another thing either by the strength of the connection between them or the number of hops you need to connect any two concepts. Back to the original question: According to this theory, how does "reminding" work? The theory states that each node is connected to one (or many) other nodes. When that node becomes active, due to some stimulus in the environment, activation spreads throughout the network of ideas. Back to our fruit example, if I see an apple, then activation spreads out to other fruit, including bananas, and continues to radiate outward to other concepts. Spreading Activation, then, is the idea that one node becomes active, which activates  another node, which then activates a third node, and so on until the activation dies out.

A STEM Example

I like the idea of an associative network of ideas because, as an educator, you can start to bootstrap your lessons based on what your students already know. A perfect example is Netwon's Law Universal of Gravitation, which is summarized by the following equation:

F represents the force between two objects (e.g., the sun and the Earth), G is a constant, m is the mass of the first and second object, and r is the distance between them. It is extremely helpful to know this particular equation when students later learn Coulomb's law, which describes the force experienced by two charged particles:

Notice anything? There are subtle differences between the two laws, but the overall structure of the equations is remarkably similar. In fact, when teaching Coulomb's law, it is helpful to ask the students if they are reminded of anything from their previous lessons.

Back to the Beginning

I opened this post with a "game." It's origin isn't a game, but a test of creativity called the "Remote Associates Test" (or "R.A.T." for short). The idea is that creative individuals have many connections between nodes and when activation spreads, it hits remote parts of the network. This makes intuitive sense because creative people are most likely to be described as "divergent thinkers." Now we have a way to visualize what divergent means. Maybe we can even train ourselves to be more creative by not stopping at the first thing that you are reminded of. Instead, force yourself to keep activating other parts of your associative network.

Share and Enjoy!

Dr. Bob

For More Information

You can test your creativity by taking the RAT here. Also, remember the overused phrase, "think outside the box"? Ever wonder where that came from? According to internet lore, its origin is found in the "nine dot problem" where you have to connect all of the dots with only 4 lines. Try it!