Thinking of Others May Boost Your Creativity

David Burkus, Professor at Oral Roberts University, has written a terrific blog post about some new research on creativity.   Burkus describes the work of NYU's Evan Polman and Cornell's Kyle Emich.   These scholars found that we tend to be more creative when we think of others facing a challenging situation, rather than thinking of ourselves caught in that predicament.  In one experiment, Polman and Emich found that subjects could solve a tough riddle only 48% of the time when they imagined themselves facing that challenging situation.  Meanwhile, two-thirds of the subjects actually solved the riddle when asked to imagine someone else facing the same predicament.