A paper by Evan Polman and Kyle Emich in the April 2011 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that construal level theory can dramatically improve someone’s creativity. The theory suggests that people think about things far away from them in space or time in abstract terms in order to improve creativity. In essence, the study participants were far more creative when trying to imagine things from another person’s perspective.
One study had participants draw aliens – one group drew aliens for a story they would write and the other group drew aliens for someone else’s story. The latter group drew aliens with more unique features, while the first group drew aliens with more features that resemble animals on Earth.
Another study asked participants to solve a perplexing riddle regarding a prisoner who escaped a tower with a short rope. Half the participants were asked to imagine themselves as the prisoner and the other half were asked to imagine someone else as the prisoner. Less than half (48%) of the first group solved the problem, while 66% of the second group solved the problem.
Both studies found that participants who thought on someone else’s behalf were more creative than people who thought about themselves. This is because this sort of thinking allows the thinker to abandon their own preconceptions and expand their perspective. So next time you need to generate a new idea, try imagining the problem from another person’s perspective.
